In Their Shadow
by Smeghead
Summary: Crossover eventually with The Night's Dawn trilogy (Not the story but the Confederation in the aftermath of the trilogy) Xander is gone from the gang and begins to forge himself a name. Faith never went bad.
1. Arrivals, Misconceptions and Explanation

**_In Their Shadow_**

**_Author: Trimma rei_ite[at]hotmail.com_**

**_Disclaimer: Don't own any of the characters in this fanfiction. They all pretty much belong to Joss, Mutant enemy, and Peter F. Hamilton. No profits are being made through the creation of this story._**

**_Summary: Crossover eventually with The Night's Dawn trilogy (Not the story but the Confederation in the aftermath of the trilogy) Xander is gone from the gang and begins to forge himself a name. Faith never went bad._**

**_Timeline: Set after Giles owns the Magic shop but Glory hasn't reared her head yet_**

**_Warning: I'm not a big fan of Buffy. Love her work, don't like her attitude towards the gang, especially Xander. And where Buffy goes so does Willow._**

**_ACC and Xandercentric_**

**_AN: Dedicated to the memory of Tim Knight. Via Con Dios, man._**

**_AN2: No, the author's name is *not* a typo, nor am I posting it for him. He started the story - this is the bit that he wrote - before turning it over to me. There's also a parallel story ('City of Shadows'), which he suggested I start after I provided feedback._**

**_AN3: There are a couple of non-standard methods of communication used in this story, represented as follows:_ Affinity _ and _**{Datavises}

**_Distribution: FF.net and XanderZone. Anywhere else, please ask first._**

**_Feedback: Yes, please! After all, it's the only recognition a fanfic author gets..._**

* * *

**_Chapter 1_**

Xander circled his attacker, some street tough, and started to slot some knuckle dusters into place. His attacker smiled and pulled out a flick knife. The crowd's cheers were getting louder and louder but all Xander could hear was his own breathing. Time seemed to be slowing but he seemed to speed up. All conscious thought stopped , only emotion was felt. He was tensed, ready to spring or dodge in a millisecond.

God, the edge felt good.

The opponents circled twice more. The punk making practice swings, playing up to the crowd, Xander just tilted his head to the left and felt his stiff neck crack. Seconds later, though it seemed like hours, the tough lunged forward with a back hand slash, Xander danced back than stepped forward and got outside the follow up thrust. The punk was good, he saw it coming and struck out with the pommel in a backhand to Xander's jaw. Xander just took it. The red mist was already descending on his vision, he barely felt the blow. Fury boiling, anger rising, pain just added to it. This punk was trying to hurt him, kill him.

Adrenaline pounded through his system. He yanked on the punks extended arm and got himself behind him, then lashed out with a savage right that caught the thug in the back of the head, who staggered. Xander's boot took one foot out from under him. Gravity did the rest, putting the tough on his back. The boot then descended on the tough's hand. Bones audibly snapped, the pommel of his flick knife cracked from the impact, his arm was pinned. The thug yelled out in pain, and lashed out with his other fist. It collided with the back of Xander's knee, little power behind it, but Xander went down any way. And drove his knee into the thug's pinned elbow. Bones splintered and punctured through skin. The thug was very pale now. But death was now a big thing on the horizon so he was able to land several heavy blows to Xander's ribs, powered by sheer desperation. Xander's ferocity doubled. He grabbed hold of the tough's hair, pulled back, pushed forward. The wet crack ended the fight but it took several more wet, then mushy, cracks to sate Xander's rage. Only than did the crowd's cheers register.

Xander wiped his hands on the thugs shirt, stood up and left the pit.

*********

The pit was located under Willy's. It was an arena, no holds barred, to the death. It belonged to the underworld. The demons Buffy killed was just the head of the beer, so to speak. This was the real stuff. Demons a plenty, Sunnyhell's actual demon population. And being the Mouth of Hell and all gave the place a much larger population of demons than what the Scoobies or even Angel's crew saw. It was like a whole demon city underground.

Willy had introduced him to the fighting just after the he left the gang. Finding out what they really thought about him one night, had left him kind of suicidal. So he'd wound up at Willy's, fully intent on drowning his sorrows and getting killed. Willy had noted his mood and after two beers had steered him towards the pit. Most likely to harvest his blood after he died and to be rid of one of the white hats. Strangely though, his feeling of sorrow had turned to fury. Coupled with suicidal tendencies, he had fought with abandon and a ferocity that had ripped a newly reanimated O'Toole to pieces.

He had found a way to vent, and he liked it. Plus the prize money and artifacts were good too.

He'd had very little to do with the Scoobies after that night. Oh he still talked to Giles and Faith; they hadn't been there, ridiculing and belittling like the others had. He talked to Faith ( which he had become pretty good friends with) at the Bronze on regular occasion and was a major help to Giles now that he had ears in the demon community. Plus he wasn't one to stay down long. He'd made new friends from the demon community, non fighters - he couldn't kill a friend, but betters and dealers and such. A few were demons but most were human. They'd never be as close as the Scoobies once were but they did each other favours and hung out every now and than.

Life was looking pretty good for Xander lately as well. The money he was winning was enough for an alright apartment, and some little luxuries. Plus if he got any artifacts he sold them to Giles and the magic shop, but if he did get any cool ones he stuck them on the wall of his place as they made nice deco. He had an alright car, one much more expensive than he could afford thanks to some underground friend. Yes, life was lookin up for him.

*********

"Hey kid, you did alright tonight," Willy's weasel grin always disgusted him.

_Yeah and the odds I die next time just increased_

"The winnings please Willy." Xander didn't feel up to sticking around tonight.

"Sure, sure here ya go kid. It's all there to, don't let anyone tell ya old Willy's not good to ya."

"Thanks." Xander shrugged on a leather duster, than grabbed the wad of bills and small bag of trinkets. He had no doubt at all that Willy had skimmed some of the cream of his winnings but he didn't really care, as long as he got a substantial amount.

"I'll see ya next week kid?"

"Maybe."

**_*****_**

Xander got into his car and sighed. He rubbed his ribs absently. Yep, gonna be a big bruise. He grabbed the small bag of trinkets he'd won, a few rings, a couple of pendants, a funny looking disc that he reckoned Giles would want, a crucifix and a nice pair of shades that he tucked atop his head. He'd probably get a grand for it all up, not to bad. Add that to the wad of bills he'd won and he got about two and a half grand all up, that would tide him over for a couple of weeks. A stray thought about how much the thug's life was worth entered his head but was quickly quashed. He simply didn't care. He started up the car and headed for the Bronze.

**_*****_**

There wasn't a band playing at the Bronze that night so the crowd was pretty small, and the place had a casual air to it, just how Xander liked it. He wandered over to the bar, ordered a beer, then sat back and watched the crowd. He couldn't see Buffy or Willow so their shadows weren't here either, good. A good looking brunette slid into the chair next to him.

"Hey, boy-toy."

"Faith."

"Nice bruise."

Xander grinned and rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. "Ahh it's not so bad."

"How'd you go?"

"I won". Faith knew a little of his fighting, but not the whole story.

"Ya want a drink?" asked Xander

"Sure" Xander watched her as he pulled the large wad of cash from his pocket. Her facial expression was rather amusing.

"Did rather well for yourself tonight didn't ya?" The want in her voice was hilarious. But than again he new of Faiths living situation. She was a Scooby but they really didn't know how she lived. Unlike the others she didn't have anyone who lived here to support her.

"Ohh, not to bad." He couldn't help it, and laughed. Faith still wouldn't ask for anything, too prideful, she'd sit and drool over it but wouldn't ask for it. Still, it was a big improvement over her see, want, take period. And taking the money in the first place was a big enough blow.

"Here ya go" He chuckled as he handed her a couple of bills, he had taken to supporting her a bit until she got a job that could support her. She worked for Giles at the magic shop but she'd have to work there non-stop to keep herself supported, leaving her with no new clothes and social life. A fate worse than death for Faith.

"Thanks Xan, you know I'll pay ya back when I get I the money"

"Please!, you give me that speech every time we do this and I give you the same "don't worry about" speech. Can we cut the BS from now on ?" It was all said with a chuckle that made Faith smile.

"Sure thing suga daddy" a grin graced her face

"Oh and you can have this too, I don't think I'll be wearing it" He tossed her a silver ring he got from his trinkets.

"Pffft, please! You know I'm not one for jewellery." She smiled and slipped the ring on anyway.

"Yeah, but I know you'll find some use for it" he smiled than took a sip of his beer. "So what have you been up to lately?"

"Well the other night we had to fight..." Faith was happy to oblige in conversation

**_*****_**

Xander rocked up to the Magic Box about eleven the next morning, when he knew none of the Scoobies would be there.

"Giles! Giles! You here G-man?"

"Coming, Xander," muttered an irritated Giles coming up form the storage closet.

"Stupid arrogant teenagers...beck and call" was another muffled answer

"Oh come on, brighten up, I brought you some toys." Giles eyes brightened at that. Xander had brought him a few very rare pieces and sold them to him at an absolute bargain price.

"Oh, can I take a look?"

"Here ya go." Xander tossed him his bag of trinkets.

"So, been up to much lately G-man?" he asked as Giles looked over the stuff

"No no, just the store. Business has been pretty good lately. You heard anything I should know ?"

"Nah, with two Slayers around, everyone is keeping a low profile"

"Good, nice to have a bit of quiet time. Alright, I'll give you fifty for this ring and four hundred for the pendants, the other items are just jewellery."

" 'Kay. Hey what about this disc thingy, I woulda thought it be magical." He held up the disc in question. It was about CD size but it domed over on one side. Bits of the flat side had engravings on it and the dome side was covered in inked on mystical symbols.

"Yes, it is magical, rather powerful actually, but you need it's twin for it to be worth anything." At Xander's confused look he continued "These are Discs of Kakulash, transporters if you will. You have one to transport you somewhere and another to take you back, from the looks of this, it's a return disc. To where I don't know but without the other one it's of little use."

"Eh, no big loss, I'll just hang it on the wall at home." said Xander, not worried.

"Yes, well I'll just get your money, then."

"Take your time, I'll go chat with Faith."

"Oh she's not in today."

"Huh? Why?"

"She said she found a nest of vampires last night."

"Ohhh, do you know where?"

"Ahhh, hiding out in the Stanforth crypt. You know the one, in the cemetery on 3rd and Main," said Giles, handing Xander his money.

"Yeah, yeah, the Stanforth crypt, what fond memories I have of that place." Giles confused look spurred him to explain. "Saw Faith fight there once in a miniskirt."

Both men looked reflective for a moment. The bell on the door broke them from their fantasy worlds as a customer entered.

"Yes, well I'll see you later Xander."

"Yeah, I'll probably drop in later this week, catch ya." Xander was already half way out the door.

"Bye"

*********

The Stanforth crypt was already a-buzz with the sounds of fighting when Xander arrived. He casually walked down into the crypt to see Faith surrounded by six vamps - that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. She had positioned herself inside a square of sunlight cast into the crypt through the open door, so any vamp that got close enough to hit her would burn to a crispy critter if they weren't careful. Xander could clearly see three piles of ash on the floor and two vamps smoking and was rather content to watch at the moment.

Faith looked like she was having one of the happiest times of her life. She was beating all the vamps to bloody pulp and they couldn't even lay a hand on her. Of course all things must come to an end. It seemed a smart vampire stepped back and took stock of the situation. He stepped back and grabbed a large chunk of loose cement fallen from the ceiling and hurled it at Faith. Faith was a bit pre-occupied at the time and Xander's shouted warning came too late. The slab caught her in the shoulder and propelled her out of her safety light. The vamps were on her in a second but she wasn't going easy as one dived in it was instantly rocketed across the tomb into a conveniently placed wall. Xander didn't think. He just charged in, lined himself up and nailed the closest vampire with a kick that would put have put Maradonna to shame.

The vamp was lifted fully off the ground, than nailed straight back down with an overhead chop to the back. The stake descended a second later. The vamp exploded into dust almost in tandem with two more vamps being propelled across the room from the pile that tackled Faith. Faith herself was almost on her feet again, holding one vamp by the front of his shirt while she proceeded to punch him in the head. The other vamp grabbed her in a bear hug from behind, so she just kicked back and nailed him in the danglies. Supernatural strength or not, he went down in a crying heap, crying as in blubbering baby... well, when ever he could get air into his lungs.

Xander searched about for his next target to find it almost upon, the vamp leaped up at him in a flying kick, Xander tried to dodge but was caught in the shoulder and was sent spinning to the ground. The vamp followed up with a kick to the ribs that lifted him off the ground and flipped him over and sent him flying several feet away. Xander pushed himself up on his knees and elbows, teeth clench in fury, eyes almost white with it, this was the reason they didn't want him, this is the reason he's useless, no more. No thoughts ran through his head, just the want to maim, kill and bring pain. Instinct took over. As the vamp charged over he kicked out and caught the vamp in the knee. The vamps body continued to travel forward while the knee remained in the same place. It's body folded over it's knee. It's leg snapped and it tumbled straight over Xander. Xander stood up slowly, calmly fished out his knuckle dusters from his pocket, put them on and calmly walked over to the vamp. He then proceeded to try and break every bone in it's body and he did a pretty good job of it, breaking some bones more than once to make up for the ones he missed.

Faith finished off her last vamp than looked over to Xander. It took a lot to scare a Slayer, and Xander did it without trying. He punched down, again and again. Kicked and kicked. Every blow made a snap, flesh was pulped, jellied even, and he didn't look like letting up. Eventually one of the vamps own shattered ribs punctured it's heart and turned it to dust. Xander didn't even miss a beat as he turned to scan for what seemed to be new victims. His face scrunched up in a snarl but his eyes were emotionless, glassy. He stood up, looked at her, blinked a couple of times and then smirked.

"Hey, I heard you were up to some fun." Faith couldn't answer, she couldn't take her eyes off the blood, loose skin and hair that dripped off Xander's knuckle dusters.

Xander saw the way Faith was looking at him. He didn't care. It was the way he fought. He didn't have the skill or strength of most, but he made up for it in sheer ferocity and ruthlessness. It was always the ruthless that won in the end.

**_

Chapter 2

_**

Faith didn't answer. The way she was staring at him, he didn't think she would. He shrugged, wasn't his problem if she was a little squeamish.

"Come on, I'll give you a lift." It almost looked like Faith was about to back away as he stepped forward, but she caught herself and smiled. She was the Slayer, no way was she gonna be intimidated by Xander. Slayers, all alike, he could read her like a book. She started up the stairs, Xander waited a moment and appreciated the way her ass looked in those jeans. A sly grin crossed his face and he placed his shades on and followed her up.

**_*****_**

Buffy glanced at Faith again. She was off her game tonight, distracted. There were no witty remarks amongst the slaying. No idle girl talk.

"So You gonna tell me what you've been thinking about all night or am I gonna have to beat it out of you?"

"Huh? Oh, nothing much"

"Guess you want the beating then." Faith smiled at that, there was very little she could hide from her fellow slayer.

" I was just thinking about Xander, I saw him today."

"Really? How is he? Has he got a job yet or is he still bumming around his parents basement? Or were your thoughts tending towards the hot and heavy kind?" The last part was said with a smirk, but she didn't get the response she was after. Faith's look darkened. The show of how little respect they held for Xander, who was once considered a best friend made her simmer.

"He's got himself an apartment and a nice car actually."

"Oh, good for him. So where'd you see him?"

"He helped me clear out that nest in the Stanforth crypt."

"Thats why you're distracted ! He got hurt didn't he!"

"No no, he got two himself. Saved my ass actually." Buffy was at a loss for words for a second. Only a second.

"Guess you lucked out today then, huh. Xander actually did something right. Thats gotta be one in million."

Faith's glare almost caught the surrounding landscape on fire. The urge to chew Buffy out was almost overwhelming. But she somehow managed to stop herself. _Don't shit where you sleep._ Didn't want a little civil war where she knew she'd lack allies. Buffy was wonder girl, always right. So she settled with just walking away.

**_*****_**

Xander was back in the underground. He wasn't fighting. Just hanging. He'd have a bet, a beer, and enjoy the entertainment. _Ahh Willy's, where everybody doesn't care._ He looked down at the pit and cringed, but it was laced with a smile as he won a bet. That really had to hurt. He took another sip of beer and walked over to collect his winnings. A familiar face was waiting for him at his table when he returned.

"Eltisia! whats up?" The demon pimp always brought a smile to his face. He was always good company, not so pushy as a lot of the other demons, plus he had some interesting stories.

"Nothin much, just thought I'd check up on one of my few human friends."

"How kind"

"So what brings you here tonight, my friend ?"

"Just here to relax. Helped clean out the Stanforth crypt today and thought I could use a little reward"

"Good good, those disgusting half bloods had been ruining some of the human side of my business. Hope you gave 'em a right ol' slaughter"

"I had a little help"

"Ahh the dark slayer, nice piece of meat that, could make a lot of money..." Xander's glare put thoughts of profits on the back burner and brought thoughts of survival to the fore. "Or maybe not"

Xander had expected it though. After all Eltisia was a demon. And friend or no friend, finding out if he would betray the Slayer was always on the agenda. Eltisia decided to change the subject quickly. No point pushing the subject.

"You seem to be doin' pretty well tonight," he said, pointedly staring at the large roll of bills in Xander's hand

"Guess I got lucky"

"If you want, you could get real lucky. On the house, even, for cleaning out the vermin."

"Nah, I'm alright. Why don't you just have a beer with us and enjoy the show?"

"Now, I reckon I can do that."

**_*****_**

Xander collapsed on the couch. Its cool surface felt good against his alcohol warmed face.

"Now that was a good night."

Xander had gone bar hopping with Eltisia. They had some drinks down here that humans hadn't even thought of before. Than they had hit the clubs for the rest of the night. It was a great night but right now Xander was physically exhausted and not a little drunk.

_Hey look at the room spin... I think I'm gonna hurl_ Hurling right now was out of the question. He doubted that he could make it a foot from where he was laying if he moved.

_Come on, you can do it- focus on one thing. Coffee table good, good. Okay lump of bills, bad. Disc of Kakulash acting as a paper weight....woah!_ In Xander's drunken haze the symbols seemed to swirl and dance.

"Heh, cool" He reached over and grabbed it to have a better look. Of course, it dropped out of his grasp half way and shattered.

"Ohh" He'd clean it up in the morning, still he looked down at the damage.

It had shattered in three places, one straight down the middle and a smaller one from the side to the centre. It seemed the center of whatever the disc was made of was black, big contrast to the dirty bright yellow on the outside. Xander stared at the blackness for a second, that was really black. It seemed to suck in light. Xander's eyes widened. the crack was getting bigger. It was now part of the floor. And getting bigger. It had a diameter of about a manhole now.

_I must be trippin, yeah thats it trippin_ Self-convinced, he just smiled and continued to watch the show.

The crack was now longer than he was - lying on the couch - and it just seemed to stop growing and just stay there, sucking up the light.

A small breeze, lighter than someone's breath stirred some of Xander's hair. The floor creaked loudly then seemed to fold into the crack, the couch went with it. Xander screamed, as he was welcomed by the darkness' loving embrace. The floor folded back up behind him. Of the Disc of Kakulash, nothing.

**_*****_**

**Ione, it's happening again**

Ione didn't have to ask what, she and Tranquillity were almost one being, words weren't needed to convey messages. Another ZTT jump into Tranquility. Another Kiint jump. She was accessing Tranquillity's senses instantly.

The air was starting to ripple when a point of total blackness appeared. It shakily grew to a circle with a diameter of about five metres, and it hovered about one meter off the ground.

**No...I... I think it's different.** Ione was puzzled. This wasn't like the Kiint's jump off Tranquility. That had happened quick, smoothly. It had been over in seconds. This wormhole was just floating there. The three quick bolts of energy that leaped around the outside of the circle only confirmed her thoughts.

**Quick, send in the serjeants!** Ione's affinity broadcast was laced with worry, but the fact that Tranquillity had sent the serjeants before she had even finished was reassuring. There was very little that could take down a serjeant, in this world or from the next.

**_*****_**

Xander saw a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was getting bigger.

_Well, guess I kicked the bucket, oh well new it would happen one day._ Xander was taking his death rather lightly.

_Lets see what hell looks like, theres light, more light, light and...ground?_

"Oooof" Xander hit very hard. He decided to lie there for just a minute until he could feel his legs again.

_Yep there they are, you know the ones filled with pain, thats gotta be broken_. He groaned and rolled over onto his back, very painfully. And stared up at a Tranquillity serjeant. Of course he had no idea what that was, all he could think was 'Demon'. It was a fair assumption.

Tranquility serjeants were approximately eight feet tall, covered in a hard brown carapace that did little to hide their boosted muscles. They had four arms, two of which were holding a nasty looking pistol and a rod that seemed to glow. It's head was a boney dome connected to it's shoulders, with slits in it for eyes and a mouth.

"Yep, I'm in hell alright" Unconsciousness raced up and claimed him.

**_

Chapter 3

_**

**_12 days later_**

Xander awoke with a jolt and tried to sit up. Silicon fibre straps over his chest and waist kept him pinned though. Something was wrong, very wrong. Why was he wearing a hospital gown, why was he strapped down, and what the hell is that green thing strapped to his leg!?

_Wait a sec. Wasn't that leg broken?_ He looked at his now unbroken leg in confusion, a green thick skin like...thing was wrapped around a section of his leg.

As the memories of the events leading to and upon entering this... place filtered into his mind...

_Shit_ He thumped his head on the bench he was strapped to as the situation he was in hit home.

_Here I am, strapped to a bench in some demon dimension with some green thing sucking on my leg and probably waiting for some demon's "Torture: The New Art" learning workshop to begin. Things can't..._ He stopped himself before he did something stupid and made things worse.

He laid there for a few minutes preparing himself for his fate. Fifteen minutes later he decided he'd be here a while so started to take stock of his surroundings. Well the surroundings he could see strapped down and all.

He was lying on a hard brown surface. It was the same colour as the walls in this small room. The room must of been built from some strange substance because there were no point in the room that didn't flow seamlessly into the next. Only the door, which stood tall and black against one wall some small silver and black patches on the walls and roof stood out. The room almost looked as if it had been grown instead of built. There was no furniture in the room.

Xander tried to move in his straps but they didn't budge, or even stretch, if anything they just got tighter.

"Shit."

**_*****_**

**He's awake.** The affinity call caught Ione in the middle of a conference with some bankers...thankfully. "Excuse me gentlemen but a pressing matter has just been brought to my attention. I'll consider your proposal and Tranquillity will inform you of my decision" She plastered a polite smile on her face, and shook hands with each of them as left.

**God, they were so boring! Thanks for getting me out of that.**

**Don't thank me.** The thought was laced with quiet amusement. **Thank our...unexpected guest**

**So he's awake.** Her thoughts conveyed her curiosity and worry over this unexpected arrival. **What do we know?**

**He's one hundred percent human, no geneering, no implants, identity unknown.**

**That doesn't surprise me. He could be an illegal birth from Earth.**

**Yes. Well anyway, he's reasonably healthy, fit but fair amounts of scar tissue, seems he was drunk as well when he got here. But here's were it gets interesting. When we testing his biochemistry and he came back with the same altered blood make up as a possessed victim.**

There were no words to portray the shock and sadness Ione felt at that. But there was no need for them, affinity allowed feelings to be felt in the conversation

**But heres a strange bit, the altered blood make up wasn't exactly like the possessed victims. He seemed to have a more altered blood chemistry and some things in it we haven't encountered before.** Tranquillity's' confusion at the results piqued Ione's' curiosity.

**Like what?**

**Well from the results it seems he wasn't possessed by something human. We haven't had or heard of an example like this through the entire confrontation. Plus the possession seems to have altered his brainwaves slightly, they've become slightly more simple, primal if you will.**

**Any idea of what possessed him?** Ione was feeling a little nauseous. To be possessed by something non human! What it could have made him do!

**We can't discern that from the results or any further testing, we need to ask him or find another example of his possession. His possession though seems to have been less harmful to him then the others. While the others produced cancerous growths to the host bodies, his seems to have done the opposite and boosted his immune system slightly.**

**Interesting, what about the wormhole he came through? Any results about that?**

**Very little I'm afraid, it seems to replicate the wormholes voidhawks and blackhawks use, but at an entirely different energy frequency. Currently all we know is that the wormhole should have collapsed in on itself.**

**Hmm, send all the results we have on the wormhole to the Laymil research center, they've had very little to do lately, but nothing about the guy that came through, the fewer people that know about it the better, don't want to start a panic.**

**Done.**

**So why is he awake?**

**We took him off the tranquilisers to study his behaviour, see if he'll try and escape and gauge his threat rating.**

**So far?**

**Tugged on the straps once or twice.**

**Is that all?** Ione's thoughts betrayed her disbelief

**Well there is one other thing.** Tranquillity's reluctance shone through.

**Come on.**

**He's been singing... badly**

Ione couldn't stop her mental laugh roaring through the affinity band.

**Oh, I've got to see this.**

Instantly, a picture of Xander appeared in her mind. He was still strapped down but his head was nodding from side to side, as he belted out...

"Fly me to the moon, and let me play upon the starrrrsss..."

Ione couldn't help it, she burst out laughing. Real life and across the affinity band. His singing was that bad, it was comical. She didn't know what the song was, it really didn't matter.

**We're keeping this guy locked up, why?**

**If it were up to me, I wouldn't be wasting the time and fuseodollars testing him; he obviously isn't a threat. But the Kulu Navy wants him checked out thoroughly. They still haven't replied to all the information I've sent them.**

**Can I talk to him?**

**I'll send a serjeant in now with a processor block.** Tranquillity knew what was going to happen next.

**No, in person,** said like it was the most obvious answer.

**I strongly advise against it, we're still not sure about him.** Even though Tranquillity itself had said he posed no danger, it still worried about Ione. They shared a bond so close, Ione was like her daughter. She had grown in her.

**Oh come on, look at him, he can barely move in those straps, he's got no weapon, and the test showed he has no implants. I'll even take some serjeants.**

**Saying no won't stop you, will it?**

**You know me so well.**

**_*****_**

"Sixty seven bottles of beer on the wall sixt...." Xander was cut out by the door clunking open. He looked over and saw one on the demons standing in the doorway. Each of it's four hands holding a weapon, two stubby pistol like weapons, a blunt dull gray cylinder, but what worried Xander the most was the large glowing knife it held. He snarled at the creature as it entered the room.

_Here it is, here comes the torture. Here comes the pure agony. Here comes... pretty lady_

Xander's surprise must have showed on his face because the tall beautiful woman, who entered just after the demon, covered her mouth and gave a small laugh, her eyes lighting up with humour.

Xander let a mask cover his face. She was here with the demons. _She's probably here to seduce me or some such crap, don't let her do it. Don't trust her._

**_*****_**

Ione watched as the mans face went blank and begun to stare at the ceiling. She frowned. _That's not good_.

"Hello" Not even a blink. "My names Ione, How are you?" Not even a twitch.

**Is there anything in the nanonic patch to make him more... trusting?**

**I could feed him some mild tranquilisers and painkillers, but that might just make him distracted and drowsy.**

**Okay leave it for now... Take away the serjeants, just outside the door.**

**Are you sure?** Tranquillity's worry was evident.

**Look at him, he doesn't trust me! Would you if you were tied to a bench while hulking four armed creatures ,armed to the teeth stood over you?**

Tranquillity didn't answer, but it's concern and worry were evident. The serjeants left the room one by one and closed the door behind them.

"Sorry about them, they can be a bit... intimidating." His eyes were following her now.

"So how did you end up on Tranquillity, I must tell you it's got our scientists a bit baffled"

**_*****_**

_Scientists? Since when do demons need scientists? And since when do they name their place Tranquility?_ Xander was getting a bit confused about things. Not a good thing.

She was undoing his straps now.

"Sorry about the straps, but we have to be careful. It's not every day we get some coming in through their own personal wormhole"

Big mistake.

"So whats your name?" Very sweet this one.

Xander sprung up and spun the girl around, then wrapped an arm around her throat, and the other around her waist, pinning her arms to her side.

**_*****_**

Ione didn't know anyone who wasn't boosted could move that fast, but even as fast as he was the serjeants were just as quick and one was through the door just as he had hold of her.

The serjeants were raising their weapons when the man lent in...

"What do you want with me?" The fierce whisper was so full of hate and fear, that Ione felt instantly sorry and guilty for what they had done to this man. He was so full of confusion and they had imprisoned him, strapped him to a bench, scared the shit out of him, treated him like an animal, and he had done nothing.

The serjeants tightened their grips on their trigger in preparation to firing. They wouldn't miss.

**Tranquilise him.**

**_*****_**

Xander's eyes rolled up in his head.

_Wha..._

**_

Chapter 4

_**

Xander awoke in a bed this time. A bed in a very sparsely furnished room but still it was better than last time.

To his surprise he found he wasn't strapped down. Confusion reigned.

_Okay, maybe they killed me and this is heaven... in that case heaven sucks. What the hell is happening?!?_ He was getting very frustrated, he had no control, no power, he was helpless. And he DIDN'T LIKE IT.

He sat up in bed and took in his new room. Single bed, white sheets, white blanket. It faced the door. There was a small table with chair to the right of his room, with an empty plate and cup on it. Xander's stomach rumbled at just the reminder of food.

A light, almost polite, cough from a darkened corner of the room startled him and he leapt out of bed. He hadn't noticed his room's other occupant.

She was about five foot nine, very dark brown skin, black hair so short it bordered on non-existant, and a body to die for. Unfortunately she didn't look too friendly.

"Um... hi?" It seemed like the right thing to do, it wasn't. Evident by the way she scowled at him.

"Who are you?" It was direct, harsh.

"Ahhh... Xander... Xander Harris" he was a bit put off by her behaviour. Why question him? surely they knew what the deal was? didn't they?

"Why are you here?" Brutal.

"Cause you guys put me here?" It was the obvious answer.

Her scowled deepened.

"Listen shithead! You are very lucky to be alive right now..." Well that answered one of Xander's questions "... and if I'd had my way you wouldn't be! So stop the fucking smart arse answers before my implant SLIPS "

_Implant? What the fuck?_

To say she was calming Xander down would be wrong. To say she was riling him up would be right, lucky for her he didn't hit girls.

"You ever tried anger management?"

She moved faster than a vamp. His natural reaction, burnt into his subconscious from years of Hellmouth sitting, was to step out of the way.

**_*****_**

Narish was surprised when he stepped out of her path so quickly. Didn't stop her though. Boosted muscles put her back on line. She thumped him on one shoulder, spinning him round. He landed on his stomach on the bed and bounced slightly, momentum and combat program from her nanonics enabled her to grab his arms before he hit the bed again and pin them behind his back. Painfully.

"Listen you waster fuck! When you jump into tranquility and assault IONE SALDANA I tend to get rather PISSED!"

"You sure it ain't PMS?" Oh, low blow.

*Pop* *AAAAAAAGH*

"I'm sorry, what was that? I couldn't hear over your shoulder dislocating" The sickly sweet tone of her voice tone of her voice showed how much she liked doing this. She didn't get to interrogate this way most of the time. Criminals usually knew they'd tell her whatever she wanted to know. One way or another.

**_*****_**

"You fucking BITCH!" Xander thrashed about in her grip, trying to get to grips with her, to make her hurt, make her bleed. She was a girl, you don't hit girls. Xander didn't care anymore, he'd kick the shit out of her. But her grip was stronger than a slayers, stronger than most demons. He was getting anywhere and he eventually saw the futility of it through his rage and calmed. She just held him there no trouble the entire time.

"Whats the matter? Can't beat little old me? Can't beat a girl? Sure I may have boosted muscles but that doesn't mean a thing." He hated her with a vengeance. She had to ridicule him. His shoulder throbbed agony.

"Now... Why are you here?" Smug bitch

"I didn't come here on purpose" Xander's response came through gritted teeth.

"How did you get here?"

" I don't know" She didn't believe him. The yank on his dislocated shoulder proved that.

"How Did You Get Here?"

"I don't know" his response was a bit more desperate this time. Another tug on his shoulder. Okay this is getting old.

"HOW DID YOU GET HERE?"

She didn't receive an answer straight away. Instead Xander arched his back, gritted his teeth and violently twisted to the side. *aaoaugh!*

**_*****_**

When she didn't get an answer straight away, Narish new he'd try something so she tightened her grip. She didn't expect him to pop his shoulder back in.

"I ..*Pant*..DON'T..*Pant*..KNOW!"

She wouldn't get anything this way. She sighed and datavised the medical team outside to come in a implant the nanonics.

**_*****_**

Kyle received the datavise and nodded to his partner. They always gave them a chance to explain before they resorted to implanting the nanonics. But this one must be a tough one to crack.

They stepped through the door and Kyle noticed the way the prisoner's shoulder was swelling. Sometimes Narish could take it too far. He sent her a disapproving look. She just shrugged.

**_*****_**

Xander heard the door open and twisted his head as far as the bitch would let him. To lab coats entered. on carrying a small box the other a small bag that he was currently going through. He pulled out another one of those skin things and walked over to Xander .

_Fuck that._ He prepared for another struggle and tensed up. The guy must of seen this.

"Hold still... this will help your shoulder" Xander was didn't believe him but wasn't in a real position to do anything about it when the bitch knelt on his back and held him down.

It felt like he got pins and needles in his shoulder for just a second as he put the patch on, than his shoulder went a comfortable numb.

The other guy spoke up in a professional tone.

"Hold him still." Not what Xander wanted to hear.

The first guy added his weight to Xander's back and held his head still. Xander couldn't have struggled if he wanted. He couldn't see anything except uncomfortable mattress.

Xander suddenly felt pins and needles at the base of his skull then everything went black.

**_*****_**

Kyle sighed in relief as the guy slumped unconscious, it was always harder if they struggled. He guessed he was lucky though, they didn't usually have Narish to help hold them down. Johnno, his partner passed his the nanonic package and he removed it from it medical seal. Currently the neural nanonic was packaged in it's small pill packaging but soon it would be placed in this poor guys head, microscopic filaments would spread out from the base of his skull and invade all the memory centres of the brain, access all the memories and datavise it all to a specially built mainframe in the Confederation Navy's interrogation ward for analysis. All in all they'd know everything he does. It was all very invasive.

_Oh well, he probably deserves it._

With that he pushed the nanonic package into the medical nanonics and into Xander's head.

**_

Chapter 5

_**

The Confederation's interrogation ward was very high tech. It combined the pinnacle of neural nanonic technology with a combination of bitek thought interfaces. The nanonic technology received raw data from the debrief nanonic set placed in the captives brain, refined and coded it, than arranged them in viewable files, unfortunately though, technology was still no where near able to simulate human emotions. That's where the bitek came in. A specially designed bitek brain, non-sentient of course, was fed the raw neuron impulse data. It than ran through the data, simulating the data in a way that the basic feelings were deciphered. They were than transferred back into the mainframe where they were displayed on screen as a coloured tint to the image. The brain also transferred the refined data into affinity for any Edenists.

The debrief nanonics in Xander's head were no less advanced. A super computer made up of sub-atomic particles, programmed to interface with the human brain, they were one of mankind's greatest achievements. While they weren't built with all the commercial add- ons and accessories, their ability to retrieve perfect memories from a subject's brain were unrivalled. They stimulated the brain with artificial impulses to retrieve the memories and were even able to retrieve suppressed memories and info from the subconscious. All raw impulse data that was memory was then datavised to the Interrogation wards mainframe.

**_*****_**

Kegs liked his job. The interrogation ward of the Confederation Navy located at Tranquillity got very little work, thanks to Tranquillity's all-encompassing presence. For this, Kegs was grateful. He found the process all very disturbing. A person would relive their entire living memories nearly all at once as the debrief nanonics triggered all their memories in a series of impulses, and everything else they as well. It gave him the creeps. God knew he had a few things he wouldn't want to relive. Oh well, he needed the fuseodollars; his black market neural nanonic stimulant programs weren't cheap.

As he sat down to the wards newest occupants file, sipping his coke, he frowned.

_That ain't right._ He was now accessing the file on the boy's subconscious. _No that's right but why would a boys subconscious be holding that much data? It almost equalled the amount of data held by the rest of his brain._ He accessed some of the data received from the boy's subconscious. It was the rough equivalent of 5 years data. He accessed the earliest subconscious memory, it wasn't video, just a sound and smell file, his holo screen flashed yellow, black and small amounts of grey as a smell that the system easily distinguished as alcohol and a voice shouted. The shout wasn't a word, just a voice and a tone. The yellow and black symbolised what the boy was feeling at the time, fear and depression and even a little bit of guilt. He pulled up relevant data and discovered the voice to be his fathers and the memory to have come from middle childhood.

He pulled up the next file, than the next. All seemed to be normal in a weird kind of way. Boredom was as feeling to be felt at school. But there isn't any school any more, just day clubs. Than flashes of street names, a paper route, a job as a child. But there weren't any paper routes anymore, not with the net. The newspaper became extinct when rover reporters started dumping news sensevises into the net. They were all alike, the next then the next one, then the next...

"Mother of God..."

A demonic visage on a person, ridged forehead, multitude of sharp fangs, hideous yellow eyes, eyes that showed only joy as it ripped out the throat of a young girl.

And an overlying colour of fear covered the image, the same colour as those eyes.

Kegs had accessed reporter sensevises on the possessed, seen the horror the possessed had caused. How they had tortured and maimed until a victim gave in and was possessed themselves, seen the atrocities they had committed to stay in their captive bodies.

This inspired no less terror.

**_*****_**

All the while as Kegs was accessing the data received from Xander's brain, so was Tranquillity. It had unlimited processing power in its neural cells, and it was done before Kegs was finished with the first file. It knew why the boy's memories were so strange, why he had so many memories, why he was so confused. This boy was from the past, from the Hellmouth, as it saw the nightmares this boy lived through, what these things were capable of, how they made Laton look like a child throwing a tantrum, how the whole possessed war was merely a warm up. For the first time in it's existence, it's fear overwhelmed it...

**_*****_**

Ione awoke screaming.

**_*****_**

Voidhawks and blackhawks on Tranquillity's docking ledges shuddered, as a wave of fear passed over them, than tried to calm their captains as they awoke screaming, or crouched in corners in fear, fighting the urge to wet themselves.

**_*****_**

To those with affinity, Tranquillity's wave of fear was all encompassing.

**_*****_**

Xander lay unconscious in his cell. The nanonics installed in his brain constantly intercepting and transmitting signals to keep him under. They did not, however, stop him from remembering.

**_*****_**

Ione rushed to Katlyn's room. Her fear pushed down as maternal instincts kicked in and she responded to her almost three year old's desperate crying. The child was tucked up in the foetal position wailing loudly. Ione reached out and pulled her into her arms cooing softly. Katlyn quickly wrapped her arms around her mum and buried her face into her shoulder and kept on crying. Ione rocked her slowly, rubbing her back, whispering how everything is all right and how nothing's going to hurt her. Katlyn was shaking badly, not being quite old enough to understand what happened. Ione was old enough, and it scared her even more.

**What was that?** It was snappish, as Ione tried to mask her fear with anger.

**I... I... I just experienced fear... It spilled out... I'm sorry.** There was a strange sense of horror in the affinity call, mixed with just a taint of curiosity. **I didn't like it.**

Ione was shocked. Never was there a time when a habitat had experienced fear great enough that it's mastery of affinity had slipped, most thought them beyond it. They had the most rational minds in existence. This obviously wasn't rational.

**Why?** Ione's fear was welling up. She gripped her daughter just a little tighter, taking comfort from the contact, as well as expressing it.

Even though she was aware of Tranquillity's affinity broadcast of love and safety to her and Katlyn, as well as quite a few with the affinity gene. She still felt like crying, the fear that she had felt...

_I wish Joshua was here_

**We have a problem...** Xander's story was told.

**_*****_**

There was never a time in Ione Saldana's public rule, or un-public for that matter, when she had visited a facility at one am habitat standard time. So when she entered CNIS headquarters, they weren't expecting her.

"I want to see him" The night staff weren't ready for this. Hell, they were the night staff for a reason. All they could do was fall back into procedure, and since she was the head of the republic they were currently in...

"Yes ma'am" The current guard gave thanks to neural nanonics, and their ability to make you say what you needed to, when you needed to.

He snapped a brief salute, which was given a slightly stern look from Ione, before he signalled to three other guards who took up flanking positions around her, as they escorted her to their only current captive. A message had been datavised to the branch's senior officer who was on his way there before Ione was through the door.

**_*****_**

Ione stared at this man-child through the viewing window, which was currently set to one way. A hidden holographic projector inside the cell projected a seamless dull wall. Captives never even knew the window was there unless they felt around the entire room.

Xander was lying awkwardly over the bed in what looked to be a very uncomfortable position. She looked at him with mixed emotions, but mostly wonder, awe, worry and pity.

He had helped save the Earth... on several occasions. She didn't think many people could measure up to that. Maybe Joshua, but he had saved the human race. But at the time so had this boy. But how he had been treated, how he had been hurt... How she had treated this... this... hero.

**_*Flashback*_**

Buffy fired her crossbow at the charging trio of Tilnrak' demons. The bolt flew true but the demons thick, slimy, armoured hide stopped it from penetrating his heart. The bolt stood out on it's chest and quivered. The demon didn't even slow down.

Buffy didn't have much of a choice; she counter-charged, swinging the heavy steel butt of the crossbow towards the nearest demons head, there was a wet crunch, and the demon collapsed but even as it did one grabbed from behind while the other ripped the crossbow out of her hands and thumped her in the stomach with the butt. Buffy doubled over, and was promptly thrown fifteen feet away into a tree. She lay there groggily, legs too weak to hold herself up.

The demons let out a rumbling roar. Then one ripped the crossbow out of the others hands, then the bolt out of it chest, which earned it a low warning growl in response. It then proceeded to load the crossbow before it aimed it at the fallen slayer. It seemed that the demons had a sense of irony, killing the slayer with her own weapon. How many demons could say...or growl that! It would have succeeded too, if it wasn't for Xander charging in and barrelling over the two demons. The shot went wide and embedded itself in the tree, two inches from Buffy's head.

Xander new this was stupid, he was gonna lose this fight, and he really didn't want to die, but if it saved Buffy it was worth it, and right now it looked like she definitely needed saving.

Xander was right when he thought he was going to lose the fight, as the demons were quicker to recover. One rose and kicked him in the head as he was trying to stand, Xander tried to roll with the blow but landed at the feet of the other demon, his face almost immediately starting to bruise and swell.

The other demon grabbed Xander's wrists in one of its beefy claws and lifted him off the ground. Xander was in no position to do anything but dangle there, eyes wide in pain but vision blurry. The demon just looked at him with contempt and twisted his arm. Xander's wrist snapped as did his arm in a loud crack. The pain brought Xander back into the fully lucid world long enough to scream.

The demon gave a throaty kind of laugh and was about to throw Xander back to his partner, when he notice that the slayer was standing next to his partner, a crossbow bolt in her hand and impaled through his neck.

Xander saw Buffy's mouth moving in a pun towards the remaining demon but couldn't hear her, his ears were ringing.

The demon dropped him and charged the slayer winding up for a haymaker, unfortunately for it even Xander could have dodged that, well not in this state but healthy Xander could have.

Buffy had no trouble, she ducked to one side and nailed it in the gut with a knee, it would have cut Xander in half, but this demons heavily armoured form saved it. It folded over however. Buffy spun around and dropped it with an axe kick to the back of the head. The demon dropped onto it's stomach. Buffy didn't give it a chance to recover and stomped down on the back of it neck... repeatedly. It died.

Buffy dusted herself off, wiped some green blood off her shoes in to the grass. Than looked over to Xander and sighed, rolling her eyes.

"Xander...Xander! What are you doing here?" She was standing over Xander's body; he had managed to get to his knees using his one good arm.

"Saving you," he managed to croak out past the swelling in his face.

"Gee it sure looks like it." The tone was sarcastic, but the Slayer's mood darkened a little.

"You were going to die Xander, even if you think you were helping, you weren't, you cant, you're too weak, and you would have died if it wasn't for me. I don't wont someone's death on my conscience even if they seem to be looking for it... just stay out of it Xander," she sighed. She had talked to him like he was a child.

With that she just left, no good bye, no thank you, and no medical attention. She just up and went leaving Xander kneeling there, staring at the ground, broken arm held against his chest, eyes glassy.

**_*End Flashback*_**

_And that wasn't the only time he had been treated like that by his 'friends'... no wonder he gave up on caring_

She was interrupted from her thoughts as the head of Facility rushed in. He was rather untidy, and slightly out of breath.

He was rather tall for an Adamist, around 6 foot five, with broad soldiers, a flat stomach and a full head of light brown hair that was only just beginning to grey. With his geneering he would live to about 125 years old, he was currently 73. His ruffled uniform depicted him as a colonel.

**He got here quick.**

**He rushed.** Ione smiled

"Miss Saldana, to what do we owe the pleasure?"

"Remove the nanonics, wake him up."

"The analysis team have yet to file a report on him and..."

"Tranquillity has. Fleks are already on their way to the Confederation Assembly, Navy, Security branches and every major system. Now release him."

"We would like to hold him a while longer for more interrogat..."

Ione had expected this but it still angered her somewhat. She knew she shouldn't be angry, they didn't know what she knew.

"Do you think I'm stupid, Colonel?" She paused just to let it sink in. "I know what those nanonics did, they downloaded EVERYTHING he knows. You cant get any more out of him!"

"We still have to hold on that assault charge."

"I just dropped it. Now, unless you'd like to spend the rest of your miserable career as a marine private, which you just might for lack of speed in this matter, you'll do as I ask RIGHT NOW."

The colonel's shoulders slumped slightly in defeat and he nodded to an operator at a console. The operator closed his eyes as he started accessing programs in his neural nanonics and Xander's.

Ione hadn't liked what she'd done to the colonel. He was probably very good at his job, but her feelings of fear had left anger in its wake. And it was one am in the morning so she wasn't in the best of moods. But she knew humiliating him in front of his men was wrong. So she looked away, trying not to look at him.

**It's done.** Tranquillity had been monitoring the operator's progress.

Ione watched intently as Xander slowly opened his eyes and rolled onto his back. He looked around slowly, frowned and sighed. He than sat up and checked his shoulder, making practice movements, all the while staring at it in confusion.

**_*****_**

Xander stared at his arm. Why had they healed him? And why had it healed so quickly?

He shook his head slightly, trying to clear his head of its grogginess and all the memories floating around. That was weird; he'd had this weird dream about his entire life in fast forward. He absently wondered if he'd had a near death experience while he was under.

He scratched the back of his head idly. He could already feel small scab.

_How long have I been under?_

A quick buzz brought his head spinning around. One of his cell walls was quickly dissolving into a window. The people behind it slowly grew in definition. He only recognised one of them, the good-looking woman he had 'met' during his earlier consciousness. But he recognised what the other people were. All were soldiers of some description. He saw a few privates, a couple of captains and a colonel. He suddenly had a very large urge to salute.

_No joy, I've become a lab rat._

The woman stepped forward.

"Xander Harris, welcome to the year 2614."

**_

Chapter 6

_**

It took a moment for the words to sink in. All those watching saw realization dawn on Xander's face. He seemed to be at a loss for words at first, mouth opening slightly as he looked about. But only for a moment.

_The future?_ Xander stared about in disbelief.

_It couldn't... They're lying..._ even as he thought it, he knew they were telling the truth. As he looked about it suddenly became obvious.

The group looking at him, military personnel, a supposed head of state, the technicians, and all the flash looking tech and computers positioned behind them. They all fitted in. Like thats the way it's supposed to be.

Ideas of demons flew out the window.

Xander suddenly felt very different, very lonely.

_Wha? How?_

His thoughts began to gain speed, jumping in different directions.

_How did I get here... whats going to happen to me... how did my arm heal so fast... did they still have Taco Bell... what about my life in the past... how did they know I was from the past... why the FUCK does my life keep getting screwed over?!_

That last thought steered his emotions towards anger. His jaw clenched perceptively as did his fists at his side.

Why did it always happen to him? WHY? Who hates him so much up there to do this to him?!

He let out an angry yell of confusion and frustration than lashed out. He grabbed hold of his bed and tried to flip it. His anger grew as he found it bolted to the ground and he had to settle with throwing the mattress. Nothing else in the room looked not bolted down.

He punched at a wall

*Thud*

_My life was just starting to recover._

Again

*Crack*

_Close to becoming good even_.

Again

*Crack*

_Why did they take it away?_

"Noo..." The moan was full of helplessness and only barley grated past his lips

Again

*Thud*

Both fists were slick now with his own blood

"No.... noo...." helplessness settled on his thoughts as his punches began to slow and he felt his knees begin to quiver. He finally gave up punching and fell to his knees. Head slowly tilting forward until it touched the wall and rested there. His body sat there in a parody of prayer, the only words heard were "no" and it killed anybody watching just to hear it.

All through this Xander never shed one tear. If he had been taught anything at all by his father, it was that real men don't cry.

**_*****_**

Ione felt dirty. She felt horrible. She felt disgusted with herself. She felt perverse.

All because she stood there and watched this man break down. It was like killing someone's mother while they were watching and then waiting around to watch them cry. Only he didn't cry.

"No... noo" Stabs of guilt in her chest. She'd caused this. Staring around she saw the guilt on the others faces. A dark skinned soldier, her hair cropped short, Narish printed on the front, was staring, wide eyed terror, hand over her mouth, as her tears spilt down her face.

**It not your fault... really.** Tranquillity's emotional support and her broadcast of love and warmth at Ione didn't make her feel any better even though she knew Tranquility was right.

**That doesn't make it feel any different.**

Ione cried for Xander.

**_*****_**

_What am I going to do?_ Ione hugged her sleeping daughter slightly tighter. She was currently lying on her bed next to her daughter in her apartment. Katlyn had a small nanonic patch on the back of her head repairing her neural symbionts from the damage Tranquillity's outburst caused. Ione would have been the same if it wasn't for Tranquillity's last minute shielding from the worst of it. As it was she still had a headache.

It was several hours after she had seen Xander. He was currently in zero tau. Ione had made them wait until Xander had exhausted himself and fallen to sleep before they could enter his cell. They'd put medical nanonics on both hands to set and the heal broken bones, and the meds had kept him under while they had placed him in zero tau.

Zero-tau was a term for stasis. The zero-tau pod was basically slightly larger than a coffin with no lid. When the subject was placed in the pod and the pod was activated, a black oily like substance covered the opening of the pod. The person in the pod didn't feel, hear, think, taste, breath, dream, smell or see anything until the pod opened again. To the person, it seemed only like the pod closed than opened again a split second later. No aging occurred.

Xander wasn't awake when they placed him in their, he wouldn't be awake when they pulled him out. He wouldn't even know he'd been in one. Ione preferred to place him in zero tau, than for him to wake up in another cell.

**You could just leave him in zero-tau** Tranquillity advised. Ione hadn't realized she was leaking into the band.

Ione felt slightly appalled at the suggestion, even though she knew Tranquillity had mentioned it for her benefit. According to Tranquillity, Ione was not to bothered, upset or harmed if it could be avoided.

Ione knew. She'd used Tranquillity's soft spot to get out of some meetings with bankers before.

**No. Thats... inhumane.**

**Sorry.**

**It's alright, I know why you said it. What are we going to do?**

**We could send him to a psychiatrist.**

**Why? So they put him through a battery of drug treatment. You know what shrinks are like now days. He doesn't trust us now. What do you think he'll do after we send him to one of them?** She snapped it out over the affinity band.

That was one of the biggest failures in the aftermath of the possession conflict. Billions of people who had been de-possesed needed counselling. There just wasn't enough shrinks. In an effort to cope, they just palmed away the non suicidal with a bottle of uppers or a tranq program. As a result it had become a habit to the psychiatrists. Over half those treated became addicted.

**No need to get snippy.**

**Sorry, but you saw how he reacted. His entire life was ruined, destroyed. It's a huge culture shock, and he's got no one go to for support.**

**How about implanting him with affinity symbionts?**

**Not without his permission. How would you like to wake up with a voice in your head?**

**I already do.**

**HA you don't sleep**

**So?**

**Point taken.** Ione was getting frustrated. Affinity was actually a good idea. The Edenist mentality and emotional support could really help Xander. But becoming an Edenist was a huge thing, it was like giving up part of your self to the whole, and never being alone again. It wasn't something you forced on someone.

And if she tried to explain it to Xander? Would he even understand? The whole six hundred years of technological advances, The culture shock would be too much. He needed to be eased into today's society and culture. Heck he needed to be eased into todays date. He needed somewhere less threatening to be brought up to speed. Somewhere more like what he was used to, somewhere low tech, somewhere like... Norfolk.

**And I know just who to look after him.**

**_*****_**

Joshua strode into the manners kitchen wiping sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. The last crop of wheat before winter was just a week away from being harvested, and he was busy around the clock with preparations.

Sometimes he really damned Norfolk's low tech constitution. The massive amount of work needed doing all year round, by people, most of which could be done by machines and cloning vats, sometimes threatened to throw him off the deep end. But than again he had this planet to thank for his lovely wife, who he was currently wrapping his arms around from behind.

Plus cloning vats had nothing on natural steaks, cloned steaks just tasted bland in comparison.

"Afternoon dear" he whispered huskily into Louise's ear, while moving one arm to cross just below her breasts and the other crossing slightly below her waist. Any one watching could see nothing wrong, thanks to the frilly dress Louise was wearing.

Louise just grinned wryly and turned up to kiss her husband, before he started to nibble her ear.

Kitchen staff just smiled to each other as they turned away from the scene.

Louise would have to talk to Joshua about these scenes in front of the servants, not that she didn't like them, more that she liked a more private showing of his affection.

"Guess what?" Joshua questioned after breaking off the kiss.

"Yes?" Louise handed him a large glass of cider

"We're going to have a visitor" Joshua managed to disentangle himself from his wife long enough to take a swig of the drink.

"Really? Who?" Louise hoped it was one of Joshua's friends. His pilot friends were so much more interesting than the dull aristocrats she was used to visiting.

Joshua's face scrunched up. _Damn that cider's bitter._

"Someone named Xander Harris. Ione's' sending him to us, actually she said she might pop in for a while to explain, something about the bloke. Said there's something we should hear." he said in a hushed tone.

Joshua placed his hand over his wives mouth.

"And she doesn't want the entire county knowing" that was said with a smile.

Louise turned and gave him a mock glare before giving him the "who me?" look.

"Why didn't you datavise me earlier?"

"Grant was there. You know he doesn't like me doing it"

Louise nodded knowingly. Her father had almost blown a gasket when he'd found out she had neural nanonics.

"We'll than, when are they arriving? I'll have the maids prepare two bedrooms, or is it one?" she gave him a sly grin, remembering some of the stories Joshua had told her about Ione.

"Two you filthy girl!" he returned the sly grin with a chuckle.

**_

Chapter 7

_**

Ione wandered towards the boarding vehicle, hoping along in the reduced gravity of the counter-rotating space dock. A baggage train trundled along behind her, piled high with suitcases, most of them were clothes, some for her, some for Xander, and a few presents for Joshua, Louise and their child.

She'd managed to get a few things made up for Xander before they left for Norfolk. She may be leaving him with Joshua for a while but that didn't mean she was going to dump him there with just the clothes on his back. Plus if he needed anything else he could use his credit disc.

_Yes five million should cover him until he's up on his feet._ she thought with a grin.

After her last visit to Xander's cell, She'd decided - while in a rather guilty mood - that a rather hefty reward for Xander's invaluable information and a little compensation for his ill-gotten stay at the navies interrogation ward. Plus it wasn't like she couldn't spare it.

Most habitats are extremely wealthy, due to the precious minerals they ground out of the asteroids they fed on. But independent habitats tend to be extremely wealthy. Individually anyway, they couldn't compare to the habitats the Edenists germinated in financial backing, but were better off than some planets. Tranquility was probably the richest of the independent habitats. With its 2% annual tax rate, multi-million and multi-billion fuseodollar companies tended to flock there, 2% of anything they make is still gonna be a lot. Plus sales of Helium-3 to Adamist traders and such, tended to make Tranquility one of the biggest earners in the universe. Yes, Ione had cash to throw around.

Xander was still in zero-tau, she'd wake him up when they got to Norfolk, it'd just be easier that way.

She sighed. This man had thrown her life into such a disarray. She barely ever left Tranquility, hell, she never had . And now she was leaving her daughter with Dominique, god alone knows how spoilt she'll be when she got back, and travelling half way across inhabited space for this one boy! Well... yeah, inhabited space isn't all that big now, but it's the principle of the thing.

_Stupid conscience_

Tranquillity's chuckle floated around the background of her thoughts.

**You know, I'm almost glad to get away from you for a few days.**

Tranquillity gave Ione the equivalent of poking her tongue at her in affinity.

**Hmmph.**

She climbed into boarding vehicle as a Tranquillity serjeant loaded her things into the luggage compartment.

Ione sat in silence as she headed towards her ride. The _Alkazzor_ was a blackhawk, with it's distinct teardrop shape, and blackish purple hull, horseshoe-shaped life support modules snug with the ship.

**You know I'll miss you, don't you?**

**And I you.**

**Look after Katlyn.**

**_*****_**

**_3 days later_**

_Alcazzor_ emerged smack bang in the middle of Norfolk's emergence zone, transmitting it's transponder signal even before the black infinity it came through closed up behind. Then headed for a parking orbit.

Ione smiled. From the look on the captains face, he and the blackhawk were congratulating each other on that last jump.

Not long now. An awkwardness had settled on her thoughts. The source. Joshua.

She didn't know what was making her feel this way. She saw old lovers all the time at Tranquility, and it never made a twinge on her emotion meter. But this was Joshua. Father to two of her children, she had loved him, she still did. And now he was married to another woman, with another child. She couldn't help but feel a little jealous. But it was his choice, and it's not like there wouldn't be others in the next century and a half of her life.

She was missing Tranquillity's emotional support and she new it. She wasn't use to being alone.

**_*****_**

_Alkazzor_'s spaceplane began to aerobrake over a large stretch of ocean, several sonic booms marking it's arrival. Ione watched it all flash by out the small window. The side of the planet she was currently on was experiencing Duchess's light, so everything was a dark vermilion.

One of Norfolk's little quirks, it had two suns. The red dwarf sun 'Duchess' two hundred million kilometers away gave off a rosy glow while 'Duke' the K2 primary shone a strong yellowish light from one hundred and seventy three million kilometers away . It gave Norfolk pretty much 24 hours of sunlight most of the year round, except for certain solstices where a small sliver of true night passed around Norfolk.

Suddenly land flashed under the space plane and Ione had glimpses of rolling pasture, crops and vineyards of Norfolk's famous weeping roses.

Norfolk Tears was Norfolk's claim to fame. The hugely expensive and sought after alcohol, could only be created on Norfolk. It was derived from a flower, a flower that was unique to Norfolk. Towards the end of summer, flowers on all the crops of tears began to droop, to face the ground, and ever so slowly, began to drip, drip the tears of Norfolk, until the flower has dried up and it begins to shrivel up. Of course the people have developed a means of collecting the tears in special conical cups. The resulting fluid is bottled than left over winter before being shipped out the next summer at a rather large sum. People have tried to grow it elsewhere, but even with todays technology it just wouldn't grow anywhere else. Cornering the market gave Norfolk a rather healthy infrastructure, and most were well off ( the land owning class at least ).

Ever so slowly pastures, crops, vineyards and large singular estates gave way to small cottages, to small towns, etc until Boston appeared on the horizon. Boston was the capital of the island/continent they were currently flying over, Kesteven.

Howie, the _Alkazzor_'s spaceplane pilot steered well clear of the city on his course to the aerodrome. Aircraft - besides spaceplanes and a small flying doctors service - were banned on Norfolk. Midsummer, when the Tears were being sold, was the only time the planet saw spaceplanes, as such they were a little skittish at 25 tonne objects flying over their rooftops during late autumn.

There were only two other spaceplanes on the grassy aerodrome fields, so Howie was able to park the space plane close to the cluster of buildings that housed the control tower and administration building.

Ione climbed down the space planes stairs into Norfolk's cool, dry and slightly dusty air as the cargo bay of the space plane coolly slid open. Howie started loading Ione and Xander's luggage onto trolleys. Zeek and Tom, the Alkazzor's communication and weapons specialists gently loaded Xander's Zero tau pod onto a separate trolley. Holly, their medic stepped up next to Ione.

"Sleepy isn't it?" the sarcasm was evident. Holly didn't think much of Norfolk.

Norfolk was founded by Govcentral's English state as a Christian, English-ethnic population. It had a strict low technology constitution and based it's social structure on the idealised version of sixteenth-century Britain. It even had a royal family, The Mountbattens, said to be descended from the actual royal Windsor Monarchy.

To most people visiting from off planet, the place seemed as backwards as they come, Holly one of them. I mean come on! Who ever heard of using a telephone?

"I think it's rather quaint" Ione shot back.

"Just don't let the locals here you call it that"

A tired looking lad was making his way over to them now, a small dog followed on his heels, tail wagging tiredly. The boy was dressed in long cord pants, belted at his waist, with a thick cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He had his hands in his pockets as he yawned at the ground. As he came closer he seemed to scan the group, looking for someone, probably the captain, but didn't find what he was looking for so he headed towards Ione and Holly.

"Evening Ma'ams.." he bobbed his head slightly at Ione and Holly, "Andrew Unwin, acting passport manager at this late hour," He grinned at them than yawned, covering his mouth with a fist.

_Must have dragged him out of bed. What time is it anyway?_ Ione thought

"The aerodrome manager sends his regrets at being not able to meet you, he is otherwise..... he's unavailable"

"Asleep you mean" Ione added it with a rogue smile and earned a toothy grin and a chuckle from Andrew.

"Yep, sent me instead. I wont hold you up very long, you most likely want to find a warm bed yourselves, how many are staying?"

"Only me and my ahh... friend" Ione said pointedly nodding towards the zero-tau pod. Andrew didn't stare too long. They got the rare zero-tau pod down from the starships. She passed their, her and Xander's, passport fleks to the boy who slipped them into an ancient looking processor block, while adding, "You wouldn't have anywhere we could wake him up do you?". Ione had made up a passport for Xander and a false one for herself, no one on this planet would be able to tell it was a fake and she really didn't want to be recognised.

"Sure, I'll unlock the med bay for you" he said while handing back the fleks. "Follow me" he started fumbling round in his pocket and pulled out a set of keys as he led them towards one the smaller buildings on the strip.

The building consisted of one long room partitioned off with curtains. Each are had a small medical block and a plain white bed with a small set of drawer to one side with equipment. Beds were set up under large windows, vermilion light spilling in enough that the lights weren't needed.

"Just call me if you need anything" Said Andrew as he motioned in with a wave of his hand before settling against the wall and started rolling himself up some weed.

Howie stayed outside with Ione's luggage as the others followed the pod in. They wheeled it up to the foot of a bed.

Ione took a deep breath than told her bitek processor to shut off the pod. The black surface snapped away with a small buzz. Xander laid there apparently in peaceful sleep, arms by his sides with small medical nanonic patches over his hands. Tom and Zeek hauled him up into the bed, and Holly was already accessing his medical nanonics with neural nanonics. Her distant stare gave her away.

"The patch on his left hand will be able to come off in a couple of days, but his right hand will need a week, maybe a week and a half, to heal fully. Do you want me to wake him up?"

She'd have to do it eventually

"Wake him"

**_*****_**

Consciousness slowly dawned on Xander, leaving him slightly groggy. Memories slowly drifted back of his previous excursions to the waking world, feelings of depression, embarrassment and even disgust at the way he acted pressed themselves against him as he slowly took in his surroundings. He had an audience, again, but he only recognised one of them, the other three looked professional though, in matching blue synthetic jumpsuits.

He singled out Ione.

"Sorry"

**_*****_**

"Sorry"

It shocked her. She really hadn't expected that.

"You have nothing to be sorry for Xander!" she said in her gentlest yet most passionate voice, "If anything it's me who should be apologising. For locking you up, for putting you in the hands of people who hurt you, it wasn't you fault, and I am sorry."

The crew seemed to wander over to the entrance and talk among themselves but were no doubt still listening. Tom the weapons specialist kept slightly closer incase Xander got violent.

Xander stared at her for a moment, not saying anything. He nodded slightly, accepting her apology wordlessly. He looked down at his hands and saw the medical patches, his eyed widened slightly and he gave them a light scratch feeling the area surrounding them. He pulled one leg up to him and rested his chin on his knee. A slight frown on his face. His eyes incredibly sad as he stared at the white sheet on the bed.

"I really am in the future aren't I?". Ione gave him a small nod. Xander gave himself a small nod confirming it to himself as he thought about it.

"Where am I?"

"You're on Norfolk... another planet. A lot of things have changed since your time, I thought I'd bring you here, help you adjust. The planet's slightly lower tech to what you're used to but I've a friend here, he's going to help you." The words seemed to spill out of Ione in a quiet voice.

Xander simply nodded, not looking at her.

"So.... whats your name anyway?" his voice was full of resignation, and hidden determination, as if he'd admitted to himself that he was in this situation, and was already going to do something about it

"Ione Saldana, pleased to meet you" she stuck out her hand timidly, with a bright smile, trying to lighten up the mood. Her smile turns into a small frown as he stares at her hand for a moment, not making any effort to shake it. She was about to pull her hand back when he reached out and took it in a soft grip and gave it a single shake, it seemed full of importance, as if he was binding himself to her.

And with that shake Xander seemed to come out of his shell and actually pay attention to his surroundings. He looks down noticing the simple grey jumpsuit he had gained in his cell.

"Hey do you have my clothes anywhere around here?"he said looking around as he sat up on the edge of the bed. His voice was no longer the same monotone of depression now.

"Sure, and a few other outfits I got for you, plus a few other necessary items" she said as she got up and headed towards the door and their luggage.

"You didn't need to do that" slight shock in his voice, Xander really hadn't expected this much out of Ione. Well not after the treatment he'd received since arriving in this timeline. He also felt kinda put off that they thought that he couldn't fend for himself.

"It's all right, I wanted to do it. Plus what could you have done, you couldn't stay in the same pair of clothes for the rest of your time here, plus you really had no way of earning money. All the skills you learnt in your time are pretty much useless here... eh... I mean now, though God knows that if the skills you have could be useful anywhere it would be here on Norfolk." she passed him a suitcase. "Press your thumb on that little screen there" she said indicating the lock.

"I could fight, earn stuff that way" he said opening up the suitcase and peering at the clothes she got him. There were a pile of smart looking clothes. Shirts, pants, jackets, hell even a tie, plus there were a couple of comfortable looking T-shirts and shorts, hell there were even a nice pair of shoes tossed in, and they were all made out of a material Xander didn't recognise but it all felt incredibly comfortable and tough. Next to those were the clothes he arrived in. His black leather jacket, a tight T-shirt with a Goth band on it, Jerk or some such band, he didn't really care, and a pair of dark baggy jeans with a belt. His knuckle dusters, wallet and boots were tucked in next to them. Several pairs of black boxers and socks were tucked in were ever room could be found.

He pulled out his old clothes.

"You wouldn't really have a chance against most fighters these days. Implants make them almost six times stronger, and three times faster than a vampire" She stated trying to relate boosted fighters to something from his time.

Xander flashed round and gave her a hard stare.

"How do you know about vampires?"the question came out sharply and harsh. Tom shifted his stance in the door way.

_Ahhh, whoops._

"Do you remember when they placed one of those green patches on the back of your head?" Xander nodded slowly, rubbing the spot on his head, feeling a small scab. "Well that patch kind of downloaded your memory" she said sheepishly.

Xander gave her a hard stare.

"So they downloaded my memory... thats how they know everything." Xander didn't know what to feel. Invaded, that they'd done that to him, that they knew every little thing about him? Hopeful that he could share things with Ione? That she could help him? Fear, they knew his dark secrets?

He held his tongue, and turned to walk down the room, pulling a curtain closed and got dressed. He didn't know what to do, he just wanted to get back to his time, to his life. He'd let them lead him for a while, until he decided what to do, until he learnt enough. Until he'd had enough.

**_*****_**

Ione saw him wander back tucking his knuckle dusters into his pocket and checking his wallet.

"That money wont do you much good here, now" he looked up at her quizzically.

"The American currency was faded out centuries ago for a world wide currency, but even thats useless here, Norfolk have a currency called the guinea"

"As in the pig?"

"Lame. Anyway we'll have to look into getting some currency changed for you tomorrow."

"But I thought you said I didn't have any currency to change?" Ione just smiled at him and flipped him a disc, it kind of looked like a CD..

"Whats this?"

"That is your Jovian Bank credit disc, simply press your thumb on the little black area to start it up"

Xander flipped the disc over and found the little black square and pressed his thumb on it. Green holographic bars sprung up from the top of the disc, and various other data sprung to life around them, but what caught Xander's eye was the bit that said five million fuseodollars. His jaw swung in the breeze like a rusty gate.

"I thought you could use a bit of a reward for all the information we got from your memories. Thanks to you, the paranormal is now government knowledge and authorities all over the galaxy are now moving to combat the threats. Oh, and the fuseodollar is the best currency in the Confederation"

Xander was still staring at the disc, though a part of his brain was still taking in everything Ione said. He'd think on it later. The rest of his brain was going along the lines of '_five mill... five... million...million... mine... five_.

Ione cleared her throat bringing Xander back to the world of the 'non money drooling idiots'

"Well come on, I want to get a hotel before morning"


	2. We're Off To See Somebody

**_Title: In Their Shadow - Chapter 8_**

**_Author: Robert Cox (smeghead_76@dodo.com.au)_**

**_Disclaimer: Buffy is owned by Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy productions. The Night's Dawn trilogy is owned by Peter F. Hamilton. At least until the copyright runs out, anyway. Since that won't happen for a long time at the least, I've just gotta hope that no-one takes offence._**

**_Summary: Xander has been transported to the 27th century. Can he adapt to life in the future? Can he ever return home? And, more to the point, can the guy stay out of trouble for once?_**

**_Rating: M-15+ (Australian system)_**

**_AN: This is where I take over writing duties._**

**_AN2: Thanks to Grossclout, who volunteered for beta-ing duties in the later parts._**

**_AN3: There are a couple of non-standard methods of communication used in this story, represented as follows:_ Affinity _ and _**{Datavises}

**_Distribution: FF.net and XanderZone. Anywhere else, please ask first._**

**_Feedback: Yes, please! After all, it's the only recognition a fanfic author gets..._**

* * *

**_Near Colsterworth, Stoke County  
Kesteven Island, Norfolk  
8th June 2614_**

The first-class compartment of the train from Boston to Colsterworth was extremely comfortable - it should be, for the price Ione had paid for the tickets - but the silence was somewhat more problematical.

Ione didn't really know if it was a comfortable silence or not, but she suspected that it wasn't. During the entire journey to date, Xander hadn't said a word, preferring to stare out the window at the passing countryside with its agricultural activity.

_I've got to say _something, _try to draw him out of his shell._

"Xander?"

"Huh?" Jerked from his contemplation of the scenery, Xander started slightly before turning to look at Ione.

"You've been awfully quiet," Ione said, stating the obvious. "What's on your mind?"

"Just thinking," Xander answered. "Wondering why I'm here. Wondering why you're taking the time to be here with me, particularly after what happened back at Tranquillity."

"After what I ordered done to you, I felt that I should make it up to you..."

Xander held up a hand, interrupting. "Given that I appeared from nowhere, and attacked you without provocation, shouldn't _I_ be apologising to _you_?"

Ione shrugged, slightly uncomfortable. "Yeah, but no harm was done." She brightened somewhat. "How about we start over with a clean slate?" She held out her hand. "Ione Saldana," she stated.

A bemused expression on his face, Xander gripped her hand firmly and shook it. "Xander Harris. Pleased to meet you." Releasing her hand, he waved a hand of his own at the scene beyond the windows. "Why am I here again?"

"You need a chance to adjust to where - and when - you are," Ione said. "Norfolk has deliberately limited the level of technology allowed on the planet, although things have been changing over the last few years. I thought that this would be as good a place as any to help you overcome your culture shock."

Xander nodded. It seemed to make sense. "So, are you going to stay here with me?"

Ione shook her head, with no small regret. "I can't. I've got things to do back at Tranquillity. Strictly speaking, I shouldn't be here, but..." Ione shrugged, unable to find words to complete her explanation.

"You felt guilty,"Xander stated flatly.

Ione nodded. "A little, yes."

"There's no real need to," Xander protested. "I tried to _attack_ you. God alone knows what would have happened if I hadn't been stopped."

"And then, instead of asking you about it, I basically ripped your memories from your head. I think there's some responsibility left over for me."

Xander shook his head. "Tell you what, how about we assume that we've both said 'sorry' and been forgiven and carry on from there?"

"Okay, Xander," Ione said with a bright smile, before changing the subject. "I think you'll enjoy your time here. It's nice and quiet." She rethought that last statement based on where they were headed. "Well, _mostly_ quiet, anyway."

"You haven't really said who I'll be staying with," Xander pointed out.

"You're staying with a... friend of mine named Joshua Calvert. He..." Ione's voice stumbled to a halt. How did you explain Joshua? Former starship owner-captain, who gave up the _Lady Macbeth_ to marry a landowner's daughter and take over the running of a rosegrove estate. That was after he pretty much saved the human species, of course.

_Saved humanity..._ Ione rethought that, based on the information taken from Xander's debrief nanonics. Xander had saved - or helped save - the world on a number of occasions, too. The difference was that, while Joshua had been acknowledged for his actions, no-one had even said as much as 'thank you' to Xander.

Xander had caught the pause before Ione had said 'friend', but decided to leave it alone. "Should be interesting, anyway. Hopefully, there won't be anything that goes bump in the night here."

Ione shook her head. "No nasties, not on Norfolk, at least." She knew that she'd said the wrong thing when Xander riveted her with a gaze.

"'Not on Norfolk, at least'," he repeated slowly.

_Damn! Did it again!_ Ione berated herself mentally. Once again, she'd slipped up and revealed more information that she hadn't meant to.

"There are still vampires and demons on Earth, aren't there?" Xander said in a tone of voice that expected no other answer than 'yes'. Then a realisation crossed his face. "And I can't believe that I said 'on Earth' so easily," he muttered.

Ione sighed and decided to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. _So help me God._

"Yes, vampires are still active on Earth," Ione admitted. Hopefully, he wouldn't take this _too_ badly.

"Then why am I here rather than on Earth?" Xander demanded. "If it's to 'protect' me, or anything like that..."

"NO!" Ione interrupted, hoping to derail his mounting anger. "You really _do_ need to adjust to life here. I think Norfolk really _is_ the best place for that. Besides, it's only going to be for a few days. After that, I'll arrange transport to the O'Neill Halo where you can receive neural nanonics and artificial muscle implants if you want them."

Xander looked at her oddly. "O'Neill Halo? Neural nanonics? Artificial muscle implants?"

Ione smiled. At least she'd managed to stop him getting angry. "In the same order as you asked the questions, the answers are: the O'Neill Halo is the ring of inhabited asteroids orbiting Earth, numbering well over fifteen thousand, and used for a variety of purposes ranging from industry to military bases. Neural nanonics are basically a supercomputer on a molecular scale and implanted in the brain - you'll get a more detailed explanation later. And artificial muscle implants are used to make people faster and stronger than normal. Does that answer your questions?" Ione concluded, still smiling gently.

She watched as Xander matched her answers with his questions. From the data taken from Xander's debrief nanonics, she knew that he was quite intelligent. The reason he hadn't made it into college was mainly because he couldn't afford it.

"Yeah... I think so," he answered, still deep in thought. "You know, this is the first time anyone's ever fully explained why they were keeping me out of things."

Ione was mildly outraged. He'd joined the fight against evil of his own accord, and instead of respecting his courage, his 'friends' had done their level best to belittle him and make him feel worthless. Why couldn't they have thought of _training_ him, for God's sake?

And yet, he'd still stuck with it. Despite no mystic abilities - such as the Slayer gifts, or the ability to use magic - he'd stood with them, time and again, to turn back the forces of darkness. The fact that humanity was still around to this day was a testament to his group's activities.

"Hello? Ear... Norfolk to Ione..." Xander said with a smile.

Ione chuckled lightly at that. "Sorry. Just thinking."

"I could tell by the way you just zoned out there for a while. I'm guessing serious thoughts?" When Ione nodded, Xander added, "No need to tell me if you don't want to."

Ione did want to. Once she explained her thoughts, Xander said, "Yeah. It's a good thing I was never in it for the thanks in the first place. After the first three years, I may have been quite depressed about the whole thing. Fortunately, most of those times when world-savage was an issue, they started off with me saving myself. And running away wasn't an option, either. If I did, there would have been no way I could have lived with myself afterwards. Especially if the gang had failed, and the world had ended."

There was more than a grain of truth in that, Ione realised. "Then let me be the first to say it," Ione said. "Thank you." Acting on an impulse, she leaned forward and hugged him tightly, and kissed him lightly on one cheek.

When she leaned back in her seat, she saw the dumbfounded expression on his face. "Y-you're welcome," he managed, before smiling.

Ione couldn't help but return the smile.

********

**_Colsterworth station, Stoke County  
Kesteven Island, Norfolk  
8th June 2614_**

"Mister Calvert? The Boston train will be arriving in five minutes."

Joshua Calvert nodded to acknowledge station master's information. Standing beside him, his wife Louise asked, "Why are we meeting the train?"

"Ione thinks this is important. And besides," he said with his patented Joshua grin, "didn't you meet the train the first time I came to Norfolk?"

Louise ducked her head slightly to acknowledge the comment. Her eyes unfocused slightly, which meant that she was remembering the events which followed. It was obvious as to _which_ events she was remembering, since she was both blushing slightly and smiling at the same time.

"She didn't explain too much though," Louise pointed out.

"She said she'd tell us everything once she got here," Joshua replied. "Something about it really being best if she explained in person."

Louise nodded and turned her attention to making sure that Fletcher didn't cause too much trouble. His name had come about through interesting means. Fletcher Christian had been the second-in-command on the pre-spaceflight sailing ship HMS Bounty, and had lead a mutiny against the captain, William Bligh. During the possession crisis, he had been one of the souls to return, and had returned to Norfolk. Despite his centuries in the beyond, he had retained enough of his sense of honour to help Louise and her sister, Genevieve, as they first left Norfolk, then made their way to Earth, in order to thwart the plans of Quinn Dexter, a member of the Light Bringer sect, who had been possessed but had managed to overpower the possessing soul and retain the abilities of a possessed.

He had intended to open the gates to the dark continuum, and bringing forth a creature that he thought was the Light Bringer himself. Fortunately, when Joshua had activated the Sleeping God, Dexter's plans had been brought undone, otherwise God alone knows what would have happened.

"Is Fletcher causing any trouble, Gen?" Louise asked.

"No, Louise," sixteen-year-old Genevieve answered.

Just then, the train pulled up, and the passengers piled out. Joshua nudged Louise, and pointed up the station. He'd spotted the distinctive figure of Ione, accompanied by someone who could only be Xander.

"Joshua!" She'd spotted him, too. Running the few meters that separated them, she tackled Joshua with a fierce hug. "Louise!" The hug she bestowed upon Louise was only slightly more gentle.

"Aunt Ione!" Obviously Fletcher had decided to get in first. Breaking free of Genevieve's hand, he ran towards Ione, who swept him up in yet another hug.

"Ooof!" Ione grunted as she took his weight. "You're getting big, aren't you?"

"Hello, Ione," Genevieve said, slightly shyly.

"Hi, Gen," Ione said, shifting Fletcher to one arm so she could hug Genevieve. "How's things going for you?"

"I'm going to get my neural nanonics next week!" Genevieve exclaimed brightly. She'd been promised a set while on Earth during the possession crisis, and she'd turned sixteen - the minimum age to receive neural nanonics - a week ago. Ione would have paid for a top-of-the-line set herself, but Joshua and Louise had already ordered a set from Kulu.

"So long as you don't spend all your time running games through them," Ione said.

"_Yes_, Aunt Ione," Genevieve said in a tone of voice that indicated that this was a topic that Joshua and Louise had already covered extensively.

"Just making sure, Genevieve," Ione answered, before turning to Xander, who had been hanging back while they had gotten caught up.

"Everyone, I'd like you to meet Xander Harris. Xander, this is Joshua Calvert, his wife Louise, her sister Genevieve, and Joshua and Louise's son, Fletcher."

Xander shook hands with Joshua and Louise and turned to Genevieve. He stopped dead, somehow managing not to gibber with shock.

_She looks exactly like Dawn!_


	3. In The Beginning

**_Title: In Their Shadow - Chapter 9_**

**_Author: Robert Cox (smeghead_76@dodo.com.au)_**

**_Disclaimer: Buffy is owned by Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy productions. The Night's Dawn trilogy is owned by Peter F. Hamilton. At least until the copyright runs out, anyway. Since that won't happen for a long time at the least, I've just gotta hope that no-one takes offence._**

**_Summary: Xander has been transported to the 27th century. Can he adapt to life in the future? Can he ever return home? And, more to the point, can the guy stay out of trouble for once?_**

**_Rating: M-15+ (Australian system)_**

**_AN: Thanks to Grossclout, who volunteered for beta-ing duties in the later parts._**

**_AN2: There are a couple of non-standard methods of communication used in this story, represented as follows:_ Affinity _ and _**{Datavises}

**_Distribution: FF.net and XanderZone. Anywhere else, please ask first._**

**_Feedback: Yes, please! After all, it's the only recognition a fanfic author gets..._**

* * *

Ione looked at Xander with a somewhat bemused expression on her face. _What would cause him to..._ Then it hit her. _Of course! Gen bears a more than passing resemblance to Dawn Summers._ Seemingly of its own accord, an image emerged from the cluster of specialised cells that was the bitek equivalent of a neural nanonic memory index. Taken from the information supplied by Xander's debrief nanonics, it was an image of Dawn Summers' face.

Superimposing the images of Dawn and Genevieve in her mind, Ione noticed a few differences, but they only served to highlight the incredible similarity between the two teenage girls. She also remembered the emotion-analogue that had accompanied those memories - affection, as if she was his little sister. Dawn had also been one of the few people in Xander's life that had shown him any sort of respect.

_Oh, this is going to be interesting_, Ione thought wickedly. "Xander?" she asked, snapping him out of his astonishment. "Why don't you tell them where you're from?"

Xander gave her an odd look for a second, before apparently realising the likely effect that information would have. Grinning wickedly, he answered, "Sure, Ione. I'm from a small town near Los Angeles called Sunnydale."

"North American-ethnic planet?" Joshua asked. He didn't bother running the name through his neural nanonics encyclopaedia - there were more than one hundred and fifty North American-ethnic planets in the Confederation, and no set of neural nanonics could store the names of all the towns and cities on that number of planets.

"Nope," Xander replied, shaking his head, still with that evil little smirk on his face.

Joshua looked puzzled. "Surely not Earth? There haven't been any small towns on Earth in..." He broke off as his intuition belatedly started yammering away in his skull. Shooting Ione a hard glare, he asked, "Okay, _when_ are you from?"

_Damn. He figured it out_, Ione thought, with some small regret.

"The last time I looked at a calendar, it was the year two thousand and one," Xander replied, seeming to relish the likely reactions.

Joshua disappointed him, though. "Oh," was all he said.

"You took that rather well," Ione said.

Joshua started ticking points off on his fingers. "The possessed. The Kiint observers. The Sleeping God. Teleporting to Riynine. This is weirder than any of those _how_, again?"

"Time travel?" Ione pointed out.

"For starters, Ashly Hanson does something similar. In fact, he's about due to go back into zero-tau for his next fifty-year jaunt." Joshua assumed a hurt expression. "And secondly... I'm hurt, Ione, that you don't remember."

"Remember what... oh." When Joshua had inherited the _Lady Macbeth_ from his father, it had been in terrible shape, requiring millions of fuseodollars' worth of repairs. When asked how the _Lady Mac_ had acquired that damage, he'd told any one of a number of outlandish stories that he'd seemed to have stored in his neural nanonics, just in case someone asked. The story he'd told Ione had been the most outlandish, though, involving terrorists searching an asteroid belt for fissionable materials for nuclear weapons, a crashed xenoc starship - with technologies such as artificial gravity and molecular-level matter synthesisers - and, stretching credulity _way_ past breaking point, a wormhole that had held stable for thirteen _thousand_ years.

A wormhole that was capable of being used to travel both forwards and backwards through time.

"You mean that story was _true_?" Ione asked in amazement.

"Of course," Joshua replied. "Have I ever lied to you?"

That was a point in the story's favour, Ione reflected. Joshua had _never_ lied to her - which made her just about the only person that he _hadn't_ lied to at some point. Then an idea hit her. "Joshua, would it be possible to use it to..."

"No," Joshua said, cutting her off at the verbal knees. "Oh, sure, Xander _could_ use it to return to the twenty-first century, but he'd still be well over a thousand light-years from Earth."

"Bugger. Oh, well, it was just a thought, anyway. But I'm still not best pleased that you took all of this so easily."

Xander nudged Ione with his elbow and pointed. She looked in the direction he was indicating and felt a small surge of gratification when she saw the expressions of utter stupefaction worn by both Louise and Genevieve. Joshua grinned and cleared his throat, causing both of them to start slightly and start not-quite-staring at Xander in amazement.

"Oh, Louise, dear," Joshua said in an amused tone of voice. "Have I ever told you how beautiful you are when you look like that?"

Louise's expression of amazement hardened so quickly that the only way it could have gone quicker was if she had had micro-valency generators implanted under the skin of her face. "Joshua Calvert..." she began warningly.

Joshua held up his hands in a gesture of supplication. "Hey, I didn't know this was going to happen, either," he said in a not-quite-pleading tone of voice.

Reminded who the architect of her embarrassment really was, she turned on Ione. "Ione Saldana..." she began in a similar tone of voice, before trailing off. It wasn't as if she could threaten Ione the same way she could Joshua.

Joshua chuckled, and wrapped an arm around Louise's waist. "As charming as this discussion is, I think it'd go better over the rather large lunch that is being prepared right now. So, if you'll follow me..." He started off towards where he'd parked the farm ranger he'd used to drive to the station to meet Ione and Xander.

**That was all true, wasn't it?** he asked Ione via affinity. **It wasn't some sort of elaborate wind-up for some devious and evil purpose known only to you Saldanas?**

**Have I ever lied to you?** Ione shot back.

**No, but there have been times when you haven't told me all of the truth.**

**That's not the same thing.**

"Errr..." Xander asked, "what about the luggage?"

"Don't worry, Xander" Joshua reassured him. "It's been taken care of." Just then, the farm ranger came into view. "Jesus, I think I'd better check the load-carrying capacity of the ranger," he added, seeing the rather large mound of bags and cases piled into the vehicle's rear.

"Don't look at me," Xander objected. "I was in zero-tau when she bought all of that stuff."

"Well, he needed clothes," Ione said defensively. "And the plan is for him to go directly to the Sol system straight from here, so bringing along everything he was likely to need for an extended stay on Earth seemed like a good idea."

"A lot of things seem like a good idea at the time," Joshua said, shaking his head. "Most involve vast amounts of alcohol, though."

Ione remained silent, refusing to dignify that comment with an answer.

**You've got some explaining to do, Saldana.**

**I'll tell you the story on the drive to Cricklade**, Ione replied. **But only you. After all, it _is_ Xander's story to tell, and he should be the one to tell it.**

********

**_Cricklade Manor, Stoke County  
Kesteven Island, Norfolk  
8th June, 2614_**

True to her word, Ione had shared Xander's story with Joshua - via affinity - during the drive to Cricklade, forcing him to bring a vehicle-control program on-line as the implications of the story had sunk in.

**Jesus, and I thought the possessed were bad enough.**

**What makes this worse is the fact that people have willingly ignored this for thousands of years, forcing those who fight vampires and their like to do so anonymously, without so much as thanks.**

**Yeah.**

Conversation over lunch was limited to fairly basic background information about Norfolk - particularly the Norfolk Tears which played such a vital role in the planet's economy - and basic background on the Confederation, starting with the different between Edenists and the majority Adamists.

The difference boiled down to this - Edenists have affinity. Adamists don't, ever since Pope Eleanor issued a decree against it in the late twenty-first century. The only other major difference was that Edenists tended towards biological systems wherever possible. Starships, implants and body enhancements were all biological, as opposed to the technological solutions favoured by Adamists.

The reason why the lunchtime conversation was being kept deliberately light was that both Ione and Xander refused to give details about Xander's story, claiming that it definitely wasn't suitable for mealtime conversation. A strangely subdued Joshua had agreed with them.

So, Xander's story had had to wait until after the meal had been finished. Fletcher had been taken to play in the rolling grounds of the manor, and everyone else had retired to the sitting room with a bottle of Norfolk Tears.

Once drinks had been poured, and everyone settled, Xander asked "Where do you want me to start?"

"At the beginning would be considered traditional," Louise pointed out.

"All the way from the beginning?" Xander asked with a devilish gleam in his eye - which apparently went unnoticed, since everyone nodded. "Okay, then. But remember, you asked for it."

Pausing for a moment to collect his thoughts, Xander started, "Millions of years ago, Earth was a planet of darkness..."

********

Xander cast his mind back to when Giles had told the story. It had been a few weeks after the Mayor-demon had been blown into bite-sized chunks, and as a consequence, it had been very quiet on the vampire and demon front.

They had been at Giles' apartment, cataloguing and indexing his surviving reference library, checking to see exactly what they had been able to move from Sunnydale High School's library before it's explosive farewell.

It had also been a time before Buffy and Willow had started to actively push him away, so the task, while boring, had gone fairly quickly. Faith and Dawn had managed to evade the job completely, and were off shopping somewhere, giving the whole occasion a slightly nostalgic air, as if it was a meeting of the Original Scoobies.

After about two hours of book-related work, Giles had declared that it was time for a break. Xander had performed his customary task of fetching the appropriate snacks and once he had returned with various pastry delights, Willow had asked for the full story of the origins of demons and vampires.

Willow had listened attentively because of her passion for learning. Xander had done the same because Giles had managed to make the story interesting.

As for Buffy, well, her mayfly attention span had kicked in and she had wandered off to the room where the surviving training equipment was stored, looking for something to hit. The story went something like this...

The first known demons had appeared on Earth about one hundred million years ago.

__

Xander had interrupted at this point, wanting to know exactly how_ the Watcher's Council had known this._

Giles had explained that those demons had long since lost all interest in seeking power on the material plane, which was a good things, because if one of those demons ever emerged, there would be virtually nothing that could stop it, possibly up to and including a direct hit with a thermonuclear warhead.

He'd gone on further to explain that these demons had been eager to take the chance to tell their story, since most demons showed little or no interest in recording things for posterity - apart from the usual, such as how to best torture a human, how to bring about the dominion of demon-kind, that sort of thing - and if there were no other interruptions, could he get on with the story, please?

Living along the dinosaurs had not been easy, they'd explained. Sure, most types of dinosaur had been little more than several tons of meat walking - or swimming, as the case may be - but nasty experiences had taught them a number of things.

"Avoid the sauropods," had been one, for the simple reason that fifty to one hundred tons of animal stepping on a demon was a real show-stopper, not to mention a particularly _embarrassing_ way to be banished back to the lower regions. Oh, and their tails? A sauropod really _could_ get the tip of its tail moving at supersonic speeds, which inflicted hideous damage when it hit. A hiding to nothing, that was.

"Avoid the carnosaurs," had been another, particularly Tyrannosaurus Rex. The "tyrant lizard king" had been aptly named. Eight tons of muscle and bad attitude, it had been equipped with sufficient offensive weaponry in the form of fifteen centimetre long, razor-sharp teeth to give all but the most powerful demon a nasty shock.

And later, there had been one type of dinosaur in particular that had earned the fearful respect of the demons.

_Utahraptor._

_It had been Willow's turn to interrupt at this point, asking how the demons had known the modern names for the various dinosaur types. Giles had replied that they hadn't, they'd described the dinosaurs to the members of the Watcher's Council that had been questioning them, who'd promptly sent off for palaeontology books and shown the demons illustrations of dinosaurs until they hit on the correct types. The demons had even corrected a few minors errors in colouring and provided some interesting - but not very useful - information regarding dinosaur behaviour. Willow had nodded, accepting the explanation, and Giles had continued with the story..._

Even though Utahraptor had been much smaller than the T-Rex, in some ways it had been much nastier. Despite a surprising turn of speed, T-Rex had not exactly been the most silent of hunters, whereas Utahraptor had been the "stealth dinosaur". And although its weight had been a 'mere' two hundred and fifty kilograms, pound-for-pound it was the most heavily armed predator in history. Not only was it lavishly equipped with razor-sharp teeth, but it also had wickedly sharp claws at the end of all four limbs, particularly the sickle-claw on the middle toe of each foot.

And if all that wasn't bad enough, Utahraptor was a pack hunter. A _co-ordinated_ pack hunter. That meant that any demon who saw one of these killing machines charging it would be best advised to flee, because if it stayed to fight, it would find itself under attack from the three that it had never known were there, from both sides and the rear. Simultaneously.

Given Utahraptor's propensity for fast, slashing, _crippling_ attacks, one pass was generally all that was required before the demon was crippled, virtually disembowelled, and vainly trying to regenerate the gaping wounds inflicted on it. Then the Utahraptors would feed. Thirty million years of sharing the same planet meant that by this time, dinosaurs had evolved a high level of resistance to the corrupting influences of demon flesh, so even a last act of vengeance hadn't been possible.

_Xander had interrupted again, asking if the Utahraptor had been the smart dinosaurs from 'Jurassic Park'. Giles had somehow managed to resist rolling his eyes before nodding. Xander had sat back and listened to the story continue once more, happy to have his question answered..._

Then a near-Armageddon had come, and it had been all natural causes.

A ten-kilometre lump of rock had smacked into the Earth at a speed of sixteen kilometres per _second_, producing a yield equivalent to _one hundred million megatons_ of conventional explosives and scoured three-fifths of all species from the planet, mostly from the top end of the food chain. The most famous of these victims had been the dinosaurs, and the asteroid had been dubbed by later scientists the "Dinosaur Killer".

Demons had suffered as well. Not only were large numbers killed in the initial impact, but when weakened species had perished during the decade-long "cosmic winter" that had followed, bringing the total casualty toll to three-quarters of the total number of species, demons had died in still larger numbers as their food supplies dwindled to the point of non-existence.

As many as ninety-five percent of Earth's demon population may have died during that decade.

Whatever the exact number had been, the demons had never really recovered, at least not for millions of years, anyway. During the geological ages that had followed, new species arose, flourished for a relatively brief time, and died out. All throughout this time, the demon population of Earth, decimated and struggling to survive, had changed.

Gone were the complacent "originals". The new breeds taking their place _knew_ that even if they found perfect safe havens on the planet, there was always the possibility of more Dinosaur Killers. This attitude was reinforced by the fairly steady stream of much smaller rocks - on average, two per century - that proved that Earth was still a target in the cosmic shooting gallery. The brightest among them considered this situation, and came to a conclusion that seemed appropriate.

_Leave._

Get off the planet.

However, this was impossible. Not only were they tied to the energy of Earth so intimately that any attempt to leave would result in death - permanent death, not mere banishment to the lower regions - but there was an insurmountable obstacle.

Gravity.

No breed of demon could fly well enough to gain sufficient speed to escape Earth's gravity well. So the demons had persisted - not that they had any choice in the matter, really - and watched evolution take its course as the title of "top species that wasn't a demon breed" had jumped from species to species. After dinosaurs came the birds, then mammals - particularly in the oceans - had started to claw their way to the top.

Then, seven million years ago, a new species had arisen. One whose descendant species would one day truly shake the galaxy.

_Austrilopethicus._

At the time, it didn't seem like much. A new sub-species of primate, not much different from its cousins, except that it spent more time foraging on the ground for food, rather than in the trees.

But it prospered, passing on its new genes to those species that followed. _Homo habilis_ - Handy Man - was next, followed by _Homo Erectus_ - Upright Man, the first true bipedal primate. Much later, heated debate would rage as to whether these species were true tool-users, creating stone, bone and wooden tools, or whether they had simply picked up sharp stones and sticks and used them. Both sides to the debate would agree, however, that the fact that these earliest ancestors of man had been intelligent enough to recognise their value.

The primate revolution hadn't stopped there, however. There had been Java Man and Peking Man, evolutionary dead ends, but still with their contributions to make. Then had come the first of the two _Homo_ sub-species that would start the long journey to the stars.

_Homo Neanderthalensis._

Neanderthal Man.

And the Human-Demon War began in earnest.

Because the Neanderthals were considerably more intelligent than their ancestors. They were true tool-users, making both tools and weapons from wood, bone and stone - the first two causing considerable distress to the now-recovering demon population, as they were effective as weapons as their kind. And Neanderthal Man was intelligent enough to realise this. Also troubling was the advent of religion. Neanderthal religion was a crude affair, but that didn't matter - the Neanderthals _believed_ in their religions, and that was enough. This, combined with the equally crude but equally effective magics that Neanderthal shamans were starting to wield, reduced to demons' options to two stark choices.

Fight, or die.

They threw themselves into the fight with the desperation of those that have no choice. From the very start, the human population was under intense pressure, fighting a holding battle for their very existence.

It was a war that lasted for over two hundred thousand years, and would probably have resulted in the extinction of humanity, just one more on a _long_ list of species that went the way of every other species before them.

Then a new _Homo_ sub-species arose.

_Homo Sapiens._

Wise Man.

For the first five thousand years of their existence, _Homo Sapiens_ - also called Cro-Mangnon Man, after the first recorded fossil discoveries - did not get overly involved in the War, but that did not mean they were easy pickings, as several demon breeds found out to their dismay when they had attacked _Homo Sapiens_ settlements. Not only was the new sub-species of humans even more intelligent than Neanderthal Man, but they had refined their weapons and magics to a degree where their effectiveness was an order of magnitude greater.

After that initial period of building up their defences, humanity struck back... and only averted disaster by the narrowest of margins.

Over the course of a century Neanderthal Man vanished, ninety percent of their numbers killed by demons and the rest absorbed into Cro-Mangnon Man, whose numbers had been reduced by slightly over a half. The only reason humanity survived was that they had managed to inflict sufficient casualties on the demon population that the demons also needed time to recover. Over the next twenty thousand years, both humanity and demons built up their numbers - humanity faster than the demons - and fought several inconclusive skirmishes. Skirmishes only on the scale of previous fighting, of course, since many of these "skirmishes" lasted for years.

And then a new player entered the arena... on the side of humanity.

The Powers That Be, the unseen guiding hand behind evolution, did not enter the fight directly at first, but their first "indirect" contribution would leave a legacy that would last for millennia.

The Slayer.

The early Slayer was different from those that would follow. For starters, there wasn't just one Slayer - there were many, depending on the need. And at the start, the need was great.

The initial Calling was a dozen Slayers, each the strongest young woman of her tribe. This selection was quite deliberate, relying on the female instinct to protect her young - and part of the Slayer set-up was to ensure that the Slayers saw _all_ of humanity as in need of protection.

Their ranks bolstered by the addition of the Slayers, humanity renewed the offensive - and immediately, the demon population was placed on the back foot for the first time since the age of dinosaurs, their numbers under pressure like no other time since the Dinosaur Killer. But this time, it was not natural events causing them their difficulties.

The demons' response was three thousand years in the making, and brilliant in its planning and execution.

They corrupted one of the Powers' most trusted lieutenants - Lucifer, or Sammael as he was known in some circles. The Light Bringer, the Morningstar, one of those who had provided humanity with their greatest hope in the form of the Slayer.

They greatest betrayer in history.

The brilliance in the method was in its simplicity. Lucifer had given up part of himself to create the Slayer Spirit, and had received virtually nothing in the way of acknowledgement or thanks. The demons simply encouraged the doubts and resentment this created, and eventually they succeeded in fanning the fires of rebellion. Gathering an army of those who thought as he did, Lucifer stormed the citadels of the Powers That Be.

The War of the Powers raged for three hundred years, both on Earth and in other dimensions. In the end, though the Powers were triumphant. Deciding to take an active part in humanity's future, they drove demons from the Earth into a neighbouring dimension, and sealed it so that no demon would ever walk the Earth again.

That was the plan, anyway.

The demons launched a two-pronged counter-stroke at the crucial moment, however. The first part relied on little more than sheer brute power - attacking the dimensional seal before it had been fully put in place. Fortunately, the attack failed, but not completely. Several ruptures were created along with numerous other areas of weakness.

The ruptures would come to be called "Hellmouths".

The second part was more subtle, and a complete success. One of the last demons on Earth mixed it's essence with one of the humans its group had seized as of combination of prisoners and food source. The results was that the demon took over the human body, expelling the human soul and killing the body, but inserting itself to replace the soul. One unanticipated side-effect of this was the fact that the demon was now forced to rely on blood for subsistence.

On the plus side, however, was the fact that it could now reproduce, summoning others of its kind into human bodies by draining virtually all of the human's blood and forcing the intended human host to drink some of its own blood.

Thus were vampires created.

Another disturbing - from the viewpoints of both humanity and the Powers - discovery was the fact that the Hellmouths could be opened from Earth, releasing the demons that had been sealed away, not to mention that, with sufficient preparation, demons could be summoned virtually anywhere. The only thing the Powers could do in response was to ensure that only one Hellmouth was active at any one time, and as for the other... well, summoning demons away from the Hellmouth was extremely difficult, but still possible, so it was necessary to extend the range of gifts offered to a select few. These were the Champions, of which the Slayer was one.

Unlike the Slayer, however, a Champion was not always a particular type of person. A Champion could be _anyone_. In fact a person could be a Champion and not be aware of it.

And then the previously unknown _third_ element to the demons' counter-stroke became apparent.

They had turned humanity on itself.

Whereas previously, humanity's effort had been focused on fighting the demon threat, divisions became more apparent - and more violent. There were still those, of course, who were dedicated to fighting the demon threat, but this relative handful were now forced to operate in secrecy, as things that should never be forgotten gradually became the province of myth and legend.

And throughout this, the surviving demons from the early stages of the Human-Demon War plotted and planned, determined to one day launch the final counter-offensive that would win them the war.

_At this stage, both Xander and Willow had noticed that Buffy had left. "Gee, where'd Buffy go?" Xander had asked._

"I have no idea, Xander," Giles had said, noticing the absence of a certain blonde Slayer.

"She's probably gone home," Willow had pointed out. "After all it is... ohmygod, look at the time!"

"Don't panic Wills, it's not that late. And yes_, I do know that it's almost dusk, but we should manage to get home before it gets dark. C'mon we'd best be going," Xander had said, rising from his chair and heading for the door. "Nice story, G-Man," he'd added with a grin before exiting._

"Don't call me..."


	4. Xander's Tale

**_Title: In Their Shadow_**

**_Author: Robert Cox (smeghead_76@dodo.com.au)_**

**_Disclaimer: Buffy is owned by Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy productions. The Night's Dawn trilogy is owned by Peter F. Hamilton. At least until the copyright runs out, anyway. Since that won't happen for a long time at the least, I've just gotta hope that no-one takes offence._**

**_Summary: Xander has been transported to the 27th century. Can he adapt to life in the future? Can he ever return home? And, more to the point, can the guy stay out of trouble for once?_**

**_Rating: M-15+ (Australian system)_**

**_AN: Thanks to Grossclout, who volunteered for beta-ing duties in the later parts._**

**_AN2: There are a couple of non-standard methods of communication used in this story, represented as follows:_ Affinity _ and _**{Datavises}

**_Distribution: FF.net and XanderZone. Anywhere else, please ask first._**

**_Feedback: Yes, please! After all, it's the only recognition a fanfic author gets..._**

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By the time Xander had finished the tale of the origins of demons, everyone - including Ione - was staring at him in amazement. Joshua was the first to recover. "Woah. That's... quite an amazing story, Xander," he said slowly, obviously trying to come to terms with what he'd been told.

Ione shot Xander a hard glance. "Okay, now tell _your_ story, Xander," she said, nodding decisively when he turned a 'do I gotta?' expression on her.

"All right, then," Xander sighed, and took a deep breath. "I was born in Sunnydale, and..."

Once he started, all signs of reluctance seemed to drop away. He skimmed over his life up to high school, making little mention of his home life - other to say, "It wasn't good." - preferring to concentrate on other details, such as meeting Willow and Jesse, and becoming firm friends with them. Details were only really added when he described first seeing Buffy - the story of how he'd hit a railing and fallen off his skateboard drew some chuckles once he'd explained what a skateboard was - and discovering the truth about Sunnydale's 'night life'.

Telling the tale of the Harvest and being forced to stake Jesse when he'd been turned by Darla saw his voice crack slightly - "And the worst thing was, it was caused by someone else's clumsy panicking shoving him onto the stake I was holding."

The Hyena possession and Halloween were glossed over, in favour of extra detail about the Master and the first time he'd saved Buffy's life - hell, he'd brought her back from the dead after she'd been drained by the Master. Angel drew some sharp questions, to which his response had been, "None of us knew until after the fact, and by then it was too late. Buffy had fallen in love with him, and she was awash with hormones."

Then something amazing had happened. A second Slayer had arrived. Kendra McPherson, who'd been Called when Buffy had died at the hands of the Master. After a few misunderstandings, such as nearly killing Angel before anyone could explain his situation, she'd settled in and joined the Slayerettes on their patrols.

From there, the story had moved to the attempted resurrection of the Master, the arrival of Spike and Drusilla, and then the major crisis that had been... Angelus.

Both Ione and Joshua were appalled by the severe stupidity committed by Buffy. "Yeah, she wasn't too bright," Xander explained. "But once again, hindsight proved to be perfect. We didn't know about the curse's escape clause until it was too late, although I can remember being curious as to why Giles didn't do any research.

"I don't know what pissed me off more - the fact that Buffy refused to stake Angelus, whining that she wanted 'her Angel' back, or that she just assumed that we were going to blindly support her in those efforts, ignoring the fact that it was all her fault." Xander sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "Willow supported her, which was a disappointment, but then again, Willow's always been a bit of a romantic."

His expression hardened. "I mean, for fuck's sake - Angelus was killing people left and right, including Kendra and Jenny Calendar, and here Buffy was, moping for her lost love. And just to make things even more intolerable, every time I said that Angelus should be staked, _both_ Buffy and Willow would accuse me of being jealous!" Xander snorted before continuing, "I mean, sure, I had something of a crush on her then, but I'd like to think that I was mature enough to put getting the crisis of the day behind us before letting my hormones rule my head. I wish Buffy had done that."

Then the Judge had come to town. "For all of Giles' warnings about how dangerous he was, it proved to be fairly simple to defeat him."

The Judge - a demon that could kill anyone with even the slightest trace of humanity in them - was at the Sunnydale Mall, in the process of regaining his lost power - when at full strength, he was capable of killing with a glance - Buffy interrupted him with a crossbow bolt to the chest.

Not even bothering to remove the bolt, the Judge sneered, saying that he could be harmed by "any weapon forged by man". Buffy's response had been, "That was then. This is now," before producing a Short-Range Anti-Armour Weapon (SRAAW) and firing it, blasting the Judge into pieces.

"I was the one who bluffed my way into the Sunnydale Armoury to get the rocket launcher, and do you think I got so much as a 'thank you' in return?" Xander snorted. "Not bloody likely!"

After several months of sick cat-and-mouse games from Angelus, punctuated by several inconclusive encounters, Buffy had fallen ill and collapsed during a fight with Angelus. "So of course it was up to me to save the day. Bloody hell, that sounded egotistical, didn't it? I was pretty amazed that I was able to subdue Angelus for long enough to get Buffy away from there. And when she was in the hospital, guess who shows up? That's right, Angelus.

"I basically told him to piss off, while trying not to show how afraid I was. I mean, I'd been stupid enough not to have either a cross or a stake on me, and there I was confronting one of the most feared vampires in history.

"So imagine my surprise when he left, calling me 'Buffy's White Knight' as he did. Maybe he thought I'd be insulted by that or something."

Not long after that had come Angelus' efforts to open the gates to Hell by using Acathla, which culminated in Willow's second effort to cast the soul curse on him. Buffy and Xander had gone to Angelus' mansion to stop the vampire, and to rescue Giles, who he'd captured and tortured in order to extract the secret of how Acathla worked.

Once Giles had been rescued, Buffy had been about to confront Angelus. By this time, it had started to sink in that Angel was not coming back. Before Buffy had left, though, she'd turned to Xander and asked, "Any words of encouragement from Willow?"

Decision time. Xander knew that Willow was going to attempt to recast the soul curse, but he also knew that if he said that, Buffy would hold back, endangering the world. Apart from that, he knew that Willow was only beginning to learn magic, and to top it off, had been injured.

Coming to a conclusion, Xander had looked Buffy in the eye... and lied his arse off. "She said to kick his ass, Buffy." Her shoulders had slumped slightly - obviously she had been holding out some hope of getting Angel back - and had gone to fight Angelus. Later, Xander heard that during the fight, Angel had gotten his soul back. But by then, Acathla had started to open. With no other choice, she'd run Angel through with her sword and pushed him through the portal... into Hell.

"She ran away after that," Xander told his enraptured audience. "She couldn't handle what had happened - personally, I think she couldn't handle what she'd _done_ - and bolted, leaving the rest of us to do her job. Of course, her mother was _devastated_ by all this. Fortunately, she came back in time time to start school when the summer ended."

During that year, another Slayer had arrived. Faith Williams, who'd been Called after the death of Kendra, and who'd also lost her Watcher to a particularly nasty Master Vampire named Kakistos, and was still suffering the emotional wounds, a situation not helped when the Council dumped her in what had to be the worst motel in Sunnydale.

Xander had wanted to help her, but then the amount of vampire and demon activity in Sunnydale had started to increase. Research didn't find any particular reason, apart from some vague prophecy about an 'Ascension', which was vague as to when, and said nothing about who or where.

Because Xander didn't have the time to try to befriend Faith properly - and no-one else in the group seemed particularly inclined to even _try_ - she had started to slip away from the group, although there had been one occasion where he felt that he'd made progress.

It had been during yet another potential Apocalypse, when a demon group known as the Sisterhood of Jhe had tried to open the Hellmouth. Even though both Buffy and Willow had flatly told him to stay away, he'd turned up anyhow.

Only to see Faith being attacked by a group of the demons... and losing.

Acting purely on instinct, he'd crashed his car into the group, killing two of the three demons, and distracting the third one for long enough to allows Faith to kill it.

"So, I took Faith back to the motel, with the intention of making sure she got back safely and helping her patch up her injuries. The plan hit a minor snag, though, since Faith was still riding the 'Slayer rush', and was pretty... anxious," he amended, with a quick glance at Genevieve that told both Ione and Joshua _exactly_ what Faith had been anxious for.

"I managed to talk my way out of... doing what she had in mind - and to this day, I still have no idea how I managed _that_ - saying that there was something else I had to take care of, and that I'd be back soon."

There hadn't actually _been_ a 'more pressing matter', but one soon turned up in the shape of a zombie gang intending to blow up the Scooby gang - at that time desperately trying to keep the Hellmouth shut - by detonating a bomb in the school's boiler room.

"The only reason I found that out was the fact that I got car-jacked and forced to be transport for the zombie gang. After managing to take out two of the zombies, I wound up in the boiler room facing off with the gang leader over the bomb, which was ticking down from two minutes to go."

Xander had managed to talk the zombie into deactivating the bomb by pointing out that being blown to bits may not kill a zombie, but it'd make drinking beer with your buddies problematic, to say the least.

"After he pulled the wires leading to the detonator and timer, he opened the door... and there Oz was, all wolfed-out. Let's just say that the next day, Oz said that he was feeling 'strangely full'," Xander finished with a smirk.

He then returned to the motel, to find that Faith had recovered from her rush of blood to... parts south, and demanding to know how and _why_ Xander had refused her advances.

"I told her that doing what she had had in mind might have been what she wanted, but it certainly wasn't what she _needed_. She, of course, demanded that I tell her what she _needed_, since I was so smart.

"I just looked her straight in the eye and said, 'A friend. Someone who cares for you for who you are, not what you are, and certainly not just somebody else who used and discarded you.' The look on her face was priceless. Apparently, her last Watcher had been the only person in her life who'd given so much as a damn about her, and when Linda died, it nearly destroyed Faith's... well, faith," Xander said with a light chuckle.

"But anyway, for a second, her tough-girl façade cracked and I could see the scared and lost little girl lurking underneath. So, acting on instinct, I grabbed her and hugged her. It was only after I'd wrapped my arms around her that I thought about the possible consequences of my actions. Fortunately, she didn't take offense... mainly because she was too busy sobbing into my shirt."

Faith had cried for nearly half-an-hour, while Xander made reassuring noises and... just held her. Drawing back, she'd said, "I bet you think I'm weak now."

That had come as a surprise to Xander, and he'd replied, "Hell, no, Faith. In fact, I respect you more for being able to express yourself like that. Hell, if I can put up with Buffy and Willow trying to treat me like a mushroom, I think I can endure the horrors of a Slayer crying into my shirt." Placing a hand on her shoulder, he'd added, "If you _ever_ need a shoulder to cry on again, let me know, alright?"

Faith had nodded, and asked, "Mushroom?"

"They're trying to keep me in the dark and feed me a steady diet of bullshit," Xander had explained, which had caused a dangerous light to enter Faith's eyes.

"Fer Chrissakes," she'd snarled, picking up a slight Irish brogue as her agitation increased. "Why the hell are they doing that? Sure, Red's worried that you 'might get hurt', but the worst injury you've had is a broken arm. Surely, it's up to you to decide if you want in or not. Actually, I'm pretty damned impressed that you _do_ want in, unlike B and me, who didn't get much of a choice in the matter."

Xander had shrugged, slightly uncomfortable. "When I fought out the truth about the local 'night-life', it was more a case of not being able to stay out... particularly after Jesse..." his voice had trailed off, but Faith had known exactly what he'd meant. Like herself, Xander had lost someone near and dear to the forces of evil, and had decided to do his best to ensure that it didn't happen to anybody else.

Looking at his watch, he'd said, "I've gotta go now, Faith. Do you think you'll be alright?"

In a way, this was a slight test. The 'old' Faith would simply say 'Of course'. Hell the 'old' Faith wouldn't have taken 'no' for an answer earlier. But the 'new' Faith had shaken her head and said, "Ever since Linda died, I haven't been able to sleep properly." Looking at him with a close to pleading expression, she'd added, "Can you stay? Please? No hanky-panky, I promise." The fact that she'd said this while unshed tears were brimming her eyes convinced Xander, and he'd stripped down to his boxers and climbed into bed with Faith, wrapping his arms around her in a protective embrace.

A couple of times during the night, Faith had woken him when she'd started squirming, obviously in the throes of some nightmare. Xander had tightened the embrace somewhat, more to remind her of his presence than attempting to restrain her. It had worked, as Faith had calmed shortly afterwards.

When Buffy and Willow had found out the next morning, they had not been pleased.

Xander had flatly told them that it was none of their business, and that nothing had happened, anyway. Faith backing him up had served to convince them of that, since the Faith that they 'knew' would have _definitely_ informed them if something had happened. Xander had added that 'it was about damned time that someone tried to treat Faith normally'.

With that said, something close to a normal friendship had started to grow between Xander and Faith. Buffy and Willow still treated Faith with some suspicion - for reasons of their own - and the situation was not helped when Faith came within a heartbeat of accidentally killing a human at the tail end of a fight with a group of vampires.

"It was pretty amusing," Xander recalled. "The rest of us were in the library, frantically trying to find out what this 'Ascension' thing meant, when both Faith and Buffy burst in, dragging some poor bastard in, and arguing the whole time about whose fault it was that he nearly died. 'You nearly staked him'. 'Well, you threw him to me'."

The amusement had been short-lived. The man was Allan Finch, deputy mayor of Sunnydale, and he knew exactly who was to ascend, not to mention when and where.

Richard Wilkins the Third, mayor of Sunnydale, had turned out to be Richard Wilkins the First and Second as well, being over a hundred years old. To top things off, he was planning to rise to demonhood, and he was planning to do it at Graduation that year. With that dire announcement, both Faith and Buffy kicked their training into high gear, which left even less time for Xander to try to bring Faith into the group.

"That was bloody annoying," Xander said. "I know I wasn't the strongest or smartest of the group, but it was _my choice_ to take part. And here they were, trying to keep me out 'for my own good', telling me that I should be 'fray-adjacent'. The only bloody thing they'd let me do was research, and that was damn boring, let me tell you."

Xander's mood hadn't been helped when Buffy revealed that Angel had returned from Hell.

"Only about a week after he'd returned, mind you," Xander fumed. "Call me crazy, but I think that if something like that happened to me, I'd tell everyone. Willow was torn between feeling happy for Buffy and worried about Buffy being able to control herself around him, Giles was pretty pissed off, which wasn't surprising given that Angelus had killed his girlfriend and tortured him, and as for me, well..."

Xander had come dangerously close to ranting, and Buffy had responded in kind, accusing him of jealousy now that Angel was back, giving him no chance with her. Xander had responded coldly that he was thinking with his brains, rather than his genitals and stormed out of the library.

"Faith was confused by the whole thing, since she wasn't around for the whole Angelus thing. When I explained it to her, her first instinct was to stake Angel. Somehow I managed to talk her out of it by saying that he might have changed for the better and that it'd be better if we kept an eye on both Buffy and Angel to make sure nothing like that ever happened again."

The Mayor had entered his 'hundred days' by this time, a period where he was invulnerable. Something that was proven when he confronted Giles in the library. Giles, enraged by his taunting, had impaled him with a sword, only to be told, "Now what sort of example are you setting for the young ones?"

Then they'd found out exactly what the mayor would Ascend _to_. With no choice, the Slayerettes decided to recruit and train the graduating class at Sunnydale High. With his soldier memories, Xander had been the best choice to work out the best way to defeat the demon and, reluctantly, Buffy and Willow had let him in on their plans.

He didn't gloat... too much, anyway.

The problem was, how to kill the Mayor? He was invulnerable now... and then Xander had asked an innocent-seeming yet crucial question. "Yeah, but will the demon be invulnerable?" Some hasty research had turned up the answer of 'no'.

Deciding on gross overkill, he'd decided to wire up the entire high school with explosives. Buffy would lure the newly ascended demon into the school, and Giles would do the honours - hopefully after Buffy had made good her escape. There was a solar eclipse expected for that day, so it was assumed that there would be vampiric minions of the mayor in attendance. That was what the school population - and incidentally, Angel - was mainly to fight.

The big day had arrived, and the mayor had duly ascended, only to be blown to fragments along with the school when Buffy successfully carried out her part of the assigned mission. They had not only survived - they'd won, although some of the students had been killed in the battle. Determined to let the high points outweigh the low points, they'd celebrated their victory, then Angel dropped his bombshell.

He was leaving, headed for Los Angeles, and Cordelia was leaving with him.

"Buffy was crushed. After everything, Angel was leaving her. For the first time, I felt some respect for him. At least _he_ could control his hormones, knowing what would happen if he didn't."

Oz had to leave after another werewolf attacked him, and was eaten in self-defence. Willow had been devastated, and Xander had done his best to comfort her. "Mainly because she, unlike Buffy, _let_ me try to help her, instead of being all, 'oh, you wouldn't have any idea what it's like', which did wonders for my self-esteem, let me tell you."

Then had come the Initiative, a government agency set up to study vampires and demons. There had been two big surprises about them though - the first being that instead of being killed, vampires and demons encountered by the Initiative's commandos were captured wherever possible.

The second had been that Riley Finn, Buffy's boyfriend, was one of the Initiative's team leaders. "Which was worth a couple of chuckles," Xander said.

Throughout this, Xander had once again been pushed to the edges of the group. He'd used the time he now had free to continue his efforts to make Faith feel accepted. He was making progress, becoming fairly close to her, and was racking his brains to try to find her a better place to live than the fleabag motel.

Buffy's place was out, as the two Slayers didn't get along too well, and he wasn't sure as to how Buffy's mother would take it.

His place was out, for obvious reasons.

Willow's was also a no-go, since her parents would object.

Which left Giles. Careful sounding out had revealed that he was reluctant, which meant that for the time being Faith was stuck in the motel.

Still, for a while, things had seemed to be going reasonably well - including the shock of seeing Spike being captured and implanted with a chip that prevented him from attacking humans. "He'd always struck me as one of the brighter vampires around. Seeing him captured and de-fanged was a surprise, but a nice one. I, of course, acted with restraint and maturity and didn't tease him about it... too much, anyway," Xander said with a grin.

Then the Initiative's lead researcher, Professor Margaret Walsh, had revealed her secret. She'd already tried to take Buffy out of play, and now she revealed the reason behind all those captured demons. ADAM, a Frankenstein's Monster of demon and cybernetic parts, with the purpose to 'cleanse' the world.

Naturally, it had all gone pear-shaped. Killing Walsh and escaping, ADAM took his instructions one step too far, deciding that the best way to 'cleanse' the world was to kill every living thing, human or demon.

"Spike, naturally, took the chance to play both ends against the middle. He'd sell us out to ADAM, then come back and extort Giles with information about ADAM's activities. For some reason, Buffy refused to let us deal with Spike properly. 'He's being useful,' she'd say. 'He's trying to get us killed,' was my response. Naturally, she didn't pay the least bit of attention to me."

In the meantime, ADAM was continuing with his plans, sending out vampires to distract Buffy and Faith while he worked on what he saw as his instructions. The vampires did their job - after all, staking them _was_ distracting the Slayers from what ADAM was up to - but Xander, Giles and Willow kept trying to find a way to defeat ADAM.

"The direct approach was a no-go, as both Buffy and Faith had fought ADAM, and been lucky to escape with their lives," Xander said.

In the end, it had been an off-hand comment from Xander that had provided the key to defeating ADAM. At the end of yet another 'research party', during which they'd found no real information to how to defeat ADAM, Xander had commented, "Pity there's no way of joining our strengths to fight ADAM."

Both Willow and himself had been flipping through various books, but Giles had drawn their complete attention when he'd exclaimed, "Of course!" and started rummaging through his bookshelf. Exchanging confused glances, they'd watched as Giles dragged an even-thicker-than-normal book from his collection and opened it.

Looking up, he'd seen their confused expressions, and explained his actions. "An enjoining spell. What it does is take the strengths of a group of people, and imbue one member of the group with those strengths." Seeing their blank expressions, he'd gone on to explain, "Imagine a person with the strength of a Slayer-"

"_Two_ Slayers, G-man," Xander had interrupted.

Giles had shot him a nasty look at his use of the hated 'G-man' epithet, which had simply bounced off Xander's hide. Sighing, he continued, "Quite, Xander, but I feel I should mention that that would have rather... unpredictable effects."

"Huh?"

"Anything might happen, Xander," Willow had translated. "It might be twice as effective, it might not work at all, and bad things might happen."

"Oh... okay."

Giles had continued, "Imagine a person with the strength and agility of a Slayer, Willow's magical abilities, and my knowledge of the individual demon parts that make up ADAM's body."

Xander had nodded, and asked, "What can I contribute?"

Giles had been somewhat surprised at Xander's unexpected offer, while Willow's expression had said, 'Not a lot', tinged with sadness. After some careful thought - and some polishing of his glasses - he'd said, "Actually, Xander, there _is_ something you can provide. The entity needs someone to provide the emotional balance... the 'Heart'... as it were. I believe that you would be suited for the role."

Both Xander's and Willow's jaws had sagged towards the ground, and Xander had been the first to recover. "Great! I'm in then... errr... is there anything we should be made aware of before we commit ourselves to this?"

"Actually, there is." If anything, Giles' polishing of his glasses had picked up speed - a sure sign that he was agitated. "There is no recorded instance of this procedure ever having succeeded. In fact, every time it has been attempted, it has failed rather... spectacularly."

Xander and Willow had understood the implications of that rather clearly. Once again, it had been Xander who had recovered first. "Is there any other way to do this, G-man?"

It had been a sign of how serious things were when Giles didn't even react. "Not that I can see, Xander."

Xander didn't hesitate for a second. "I'm in," he'd said, with Willow not far behind. "But we'd better stick with the one-Slayer contribution. This thing is going to be hard enough to pull off as it is." Willow had looked at him in amazement, for two reasons. The first was the fact that he'd made the connection that quickly. The second was his ready acceptance of the fact that either Buffy or Faith wasn't going to be able to contribute.

When they'd informed Buffy and Faith, they'd immediately started arguing as to which of them was going to be the Slayer to contribute. The decision came from a totally unexpected quarter, though...

"Buffy," Xander said firmly.

Faith had turned on him, furiously demanding to know why. "She's got more experience at this gig, Faith," Xander had said calmly, placing a hand on Faith's shoulder. Both Buffy and Willow had shot incredulous glares his way, which he ignored. "And there's an important job I want you to do. While this thing is going on, the three of us aren't going to be able to drive our bodies, and we're going to need someone to look after them for us. You're the person I'm going to trust with that responsibility, Faith," he'd added earnestly and with complete sincerity.

Faith had been struck dumb by the sheer trust he'd placed in her. Acting on impulse, she'd wrapped her arms around him, and said, "I won't let you down, X-man," while fighting back tears.

Xander had stroked her hair gently and replied, "I know you won't, Faith." After a brief squeeze, he'd let her go and stepped back. "Let's go."

In the end, the spell had worked, and ADAM was defeated. Xander's trust in Faith had been repaid, as during the fight with ADAM, a couple of his minions had happened to stumble across the inert bodies of Xander, Willow and Giles. If not for Faith's staking them, their spirits would have been trapped in Buffy's body, with unpredictable results.

Once again, a Big Bad had been defeated, and life in Sunnydale returned to what passed for normal.

Unfortunately for Xander, this involved the attempts by Buffy and Willow to push him away, much to Faith's disgust. "Why do you put up with it, X-man?" she'd asked one night at the Bronze.

Xander had shrugged. "Dunno," he'd said. "Actually, my putting-up-with-it tolerance has just about reached its limits. Apart from that, I _can't_ just step aside, knowing what I know. It might not be a destiny thing like you and Buffy, but... it's just something I have to do," he'd finished.

Acting on impulse again, Faith had reached across the table and grabbed Xander's hand. "You do something of your own free will that me and Buffy are forced to do as a 'destiny thing'. That _really_ impresses me, X-man," she'd said, giving his hand a gentle squeeze.

"Thanks Faith," he'd replied, gently squeezing back. "That means a lot to me, it really does."

Not long after that night, Buffy had stepped up her efforts to exclude Xander from the slay-age, starting to call him 'useless' and a 'liability'. Faith had been appalled, but unable to break through the blonde Slayer's obstinance. Xander had just...

Plastered a completely blank expression on his face, turned on his heel and left, as the two Slayers began to argue loudly.

Later that night, he'd stumbled into Willy's, which surprised the 'regulars', since he'd been alone _and_ drunk. No-one made a move towards him though, as his expression was a duplicate of the one that had caused Angelus to back off - one that said, 'If you want to try something, you'd better hope that it works first time, 'cause that's the only chance you'll get'.

Flopping onto a bar stool, he'd handed Willy a fifty and said, "Scotch. Neat. And keep it coming until that runs out. I'll work something out from there."

Willy, his expression even more weasel-like than usual, hadn't said anything, instead simply handing Xander a shot glass.

Xander had been on his third drink - and reaching that area where he was feeling no pain - when the sounds of a crowd cheering had filtered through the alcohol-induced insulation around his brain. "What's going on, Willy?"

"Nothing, kid. It's just..." Xander's expression had spoken of painful death unless Willy quit the bullshit. "I've got a basement, where I stage pit-fights twice a month. All fights are to the death, and the winner gets a cut of the bets placed."

Xander had nodded, and stood up. "Show me, Willy." Once again, protests had been stillborn, and Willy had wordlessly led Xander to a curtained-off alcove behind the bar which, when pulled back revealed a set of steps leading down to the basement.

The basement turned out to be a fairly large room - it had to be, since the roped-off area in the centrer took up a fair proportion of the space - whose walls were crammed with bleacher-style seating packed with a mix of vampires and demons, with the occasional human here and there. The air was full of the cheers of the crowd backing their chosen fighter, and placing bets. In the ring, two demons that Xander was unfamiliar with were slugging it out.

A twisted grin had appeared on Xander's face. "I think I'm going to find this interesting."

********

"...and after a couple more visits, Willy suggested that I start participating. I though, 'What the hell' and agreed." Xander took in the appalled expressions of his audience. "What else did I have? My oldest friend and the person I'd called 'my Hero' had basically rejected me. Giles was too busy with training Faith and Buffy to try to help, and Buffy and Willow basically ignored all efforts by Faith and Dawn to try to talk them around."

Louise visibly shook herself. "But surely Faith would have tried something," she protested.

"She did," Xander admitted. "And looking back on it, I must have been in a bad way to not to have paid any attention to her. Then again, maybe some part of my mind was telling me that some of it was for her."

"What do you mean by that, Xander?" Ione asked.

"Well, she was still at that fleabag motel, and every time I won a fight, I'd give some of the winnings to her so that she could pay the bills and manage to eat. After a while she stopped telling me that I'd be killed one day, and simply started accepting the money I gave her. Of course, she _did_ start insisting that one day she was going to pay me back. Maybe she was trying to kick my sense of self-preservation into gear. After all, money's no use to a dead man," he finished with a slight smile.

"Oh, I don't know about that," Joshua commented, thinking about the possessed, who'd been the souls of the dead returned to take over the living.

"True," Xander agreed, thinking about vampires, who were demons who'd taken over a dead body.

Joshua shook himself, and noticed the drinks, which had been untouched during Xander's story. "I think this calls for a toast," he said, motioning for everyone to pick up their glasses.

"You don't have to do this, Joshua," Xander protested weakly, but was over-ridden.

"Yes, I do, Xander," Joshua replied. "To Xander," he said formally, "who has stood up to the forces of darkness..." He paused before suddenly grinning wickedly, before continuing in a more normal tone of voice, "... and given them the finger, and kicked them in the nuts."


	5. Joshua's Tale 1 of 3

**_Title: In Their Shadow_**

**_Author: Robert Cox (smeghead_76@dodo.com.au)_**

**_Disclaimer: Buffy is owned by Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy productions. The Night's Dawn trilogy is owned by Peter F. Hamilton. At least until the copyright runs out, anyway. Since that won't happen for a long time at the least, I've just gotta hope that no-one takes offence._**

**_Summary: Xander has been transported to the 27th century. Can he adapt to life in the future? Can he ever return home? And, more to the point, can the guy stay out of trouble for once?_**

**_Rating: M-15+ (Australian system)_**

**_AN: Thanks to Grossclout, who volunteered for beta-ing duties in the later parts._**

**_AN2: There are a couple of non-standard methods of communication used in this story, represented as follows:_ Affinity _ and _**{Datavises}

**_AN3: This is basically a summarisation of 'The Reality Dysfunction' - the first part of the Night's Dawn trilogy - dressed up as Joshua telling his story to Xander. If anyone's feeling keen enough to read it, I can't recommend it enough. Questions like, 'Who is Dominique, and why did Joshua react the way he did to Ione's threat/promise to introduce Xander to her?' will be answered. Be warned, though - it's not for the faint-hearted, as it runs to something over 1200 pages. By comparison, 'The Lord of the Rings' tops out at just over 1000._**

* * *

Xander reluctantly raised his glass to his lips - partly from embarrassment, and partly because this was a completely new drink to him - and took a cautious sip. The Norfolk Tears was smooth in his mouth, but breathed fire into his stomach.

"Jesus," he gasped, and looked at his glass with amazement.

"Good stuff, isn't it?" Joshua asked with a grin.

"You bet it is," Xander replied, and polished off the glass, and Joshua refilled it.

"Okay, our turn to tell a story," Joshua said, indicating Louse and Ione as well as himself.

Xander put his glass back on the table and settled back. "Okay, lay it on me," he said.

"Your wish is my command," Joshua said with a grin, but to Xander's surprise, it was Ione who started off the story.

********

The story started in the early twenty-fifth century, when a scoutship from the Kulu Kingdom entered what was to all intents and purposes, a fairly average star system, only to discover that there was no terracomp planet in the system.

Xander asked, "What's a terracomp planet?"

"A terracomp - or terracompatbile - planet is an Earth-like world," Ione answered.

"Oh, okay."

Despite that fact, the scoutship commander had decided to run a full scan of the system - the people who get picked for the job of scouting new systems tend to be meticulous people, and besides, the cost of the survey wouldn't add a great deal to the already staggering cost of the mission - which had gone smoothly, until they reached the first gas giant, which the crew had named Mirchusko.

At first, it seemed like just another ring, albeit at an unusually high altitude. Then one of the sensor officers had noticed the strange spectroscopy readings. Curiosity fully engaged, the commander had ordered a closer inspection. The results amazed everyone.

The outer ring wasn't made up of the usual rocks, dust and ice. It consisted of rubble - rubble from an extraordinary number of habitats. Speculation that it was some sort of Edenist outpost had been short-lived, as the Edenists only colonised settled systems, to make it easier to sell the Helium-3 that they mined. Apart from anything else, there had been a truly staggering number of habitats - estimates ranged from sixty to seventy _thousand_ habitats, which was about three times the number of Edenist habitats throughout the entire Confederation. Even the Jovian habitats numbered just over three thousand.

The report back to the Kulu Corporation - the massive, multi-disciplinary corporation owned by the reigning Saldana family - had sent shockwaves through the Kulu Kingdom, particularly when the follow-up scientific mission revealed that the habitats making up what was now becoming called the Ruin Ring hadn't been destroyed by natural means or an outside event.

All seventy thousand habitats had committed _suicide_, and en masse, too.

The then-Crown Price Michael Saldana had entered into negotiations with the Edenists to purchase a habitat seed, which he intended to germinate in orbit above Mirchusko for use as a base of research. Given Kulu's staunch anti-bitek stance - some said it bordered on fanaticism - this was a move that generated a severe backlash among the population of Kulu, particularly when the seed arrived at Mirchusko in the year 2428, and was attached to the asteroid which would serve as its food source for the next six years.

Some astute handling of the situation could have smoothed the situation out - after all, a habitat _was_ perfect for the long-term analysis that would probably be required, but Michael then proceeded to have affinity symbionts implanted, on the grounds that they would enable him to communicate with the maturing habitat.

This too was endured, but Michael crossed the line when he had the affinity gene sequenced into his son Maurice, who was then an embryo in an exowomb. The storm of controversy and public indignation swept all before it throughout the Kulu system. Michael's actions were deemed to be unconsciable, given that one of the King of Kulu's titles was 'Defender of the Faith', and the continued denouncing of affinity - all bitek, in fact - by _all_ religions.

Michael abdicated all claims to the Phoenix Throne in favour of his brother Lukas, and was exiled to the young habitat Tranquillity. In order to survive, and to maintain the research into the Ruin Ring, he was forced to write a tax-haven constitution, in order to attract the rich, so that he could live off their surplus.

It was a spectacular success. With the habitat personality overseeing the day-to-day affairs of the habitat, and the personality-controlled serjeants enforcing the laws, Tranquillity quickly became to be regarded as the place to go if you made it. When Michael Saldana - now glorying in the ironic title of Lord of Ruin - opened Tranquillity to blackhawk mating flights, he raised a few Edenist eyebrows, but made himself even more popular among the inhabitants, who had occasional uses for the mercenary starships, along with the combat-boosted mercenaries who started showing up as well.

When Michael Saldana died, he didn't transfer into the habitat's neural structure - causing some fairly hefty sums of money to change hands as the results of various bets - and he left his son Maurice with a thriving economy, the most important trading port in the sector... and a persistent enigma in the form of the Laymil and the Ruin Ring.

In fact, virtually the only things that had been discovered about the previous inhabitants of the system was their name and some basic facts about their biochemistry. Not that Tranquillity organised the collection of artefacts - that was left up to 'scavengers', people who took odd-ball, unique and sometimes jury-rigged spacecraft into the Ruin Ring's orbit, then went extra-vehicular to sift the Ruin Ring by hand in search of useful artefacts they could then sell for a good price.

People like Joshua, in fact.

********

By the time Ione had finished the first part of the story, Xander was enraptured by the description of Tranquillity's parklands, restaraunts and clubs. "Man," he said softly, "I wish I'd had the chance to stay a bit longer."

A brief look of remorse crossed Ione's face. "If you get the chance, come back for a visit," she told him, reaching across the table to pat his hand.

"Would I get a better reception than the last time I dropped in?" Xander asked with an impish grin.

"Sure," Ione replied. "So long as you come through the spaceport like normal people."

"Nitpick, nitpick."

"I might even introduce you to a friend of mine," Ione said slyly. "I think you'd like her."

As Ione said that, Joshua was taking a sip of Tears, and that pronouncement caused him to splutter and nearly choke. "Oh, no," he said. "You _can't_ be thinking about introducing him to Dominique... bloody hell, you are, aren't you?"

"And what if I am?" Ione asked with a dangerous gleam in her eye.

"She'll eat him alive," Joshua muttered. "The exhaustion would probably kill him," he added, remembering his own experiences with the blonde bombshell. "Although he'd probably die smiling."

Xander was wearing a confused expression, while the women were trying to stifle laughter. "Do I want to know?" he asked, looking from face to face.

"I'll tell you when the time comes. But to pick up where Ione left off, yes I was one of the Ruin Ring scavengers, and I was lucky in that I had a proper spacecraft to use - the spaceplane from my starship, the _Lady Macbeth_..."

**** 

Joshua had been just another scavenger, although luckier than most, with an enviable lifestyle. He'd go out into the Ruin Ring once a week, and party himself senseless in-between. He didn't go into much detail, but Xander had gotten the idea that there were a number of willing women, including... Ione? A glance at her confirmed that.

It made for a comfortable living, but Joshua wasn't interested in that. What he had in mind required a _lot_ of money - five million fuseodollars, to be exact, as his intention was to restore the damaged _Lady Mac_ to flightworthy status.

Then Joshua had made his Big Strike. Delving deeper into the Ruin Ring than he ever had before, he'd stumbled on an incredible discovery - a completely intact Laymil electronics stack, perfectly preserved in ice for the two and a half thousand years since the destruction of the Laymil habitats.

There had been a problem, though - in the form of two other scavengers who'd wanted to take whatever it was that Joshua had found for themselves. "Those bastards tried to kill me," he snarled. "But I managed to see them off."

Although injured, he'd managed to return to Tranquillity, where'd he put the electronics stack up for sale. He'd been fairly confident that it would raise the funds he needed for a refit of the _Lady Mac_, but when Tranquillity had invoked its right of final bid - at nearly seven and a half million fuseodollars - it gave Joshua enough money to replace the _Lady Mac_'s damaged components with brand new kit. A life of the owner-captain an independent trading starship beckoned. Hiring a crew - Ashly Hanson, spaceplane pilot; Sarha Mitcham, systems specialist; Warlow, a cosmonik who was the maintenance officer; Melvyn Ducharme, fusion specialist and Dahybi Yadev, node specialist - he'd set out to make a fortune.

Unfortunately, reality had bitten _hard_. In the first six months, Joshua barely made enough to cover costs - and he wasn't even _considering_ mercenary actions, although he could have; the _Lady Mac_ was an _armed_ starship, with eight maser cannon, combat wasp launch cradles and an antimatter drive - and his one attempt at a slightly-less-than-legal flight had ended when he was intercepted by Confederation Navy voidhawks, although the incriminating cargo had been dumped.

Undaunted, he'd simply set his sights higher. Norfolk was approaching conjunction - the point where the planet was between the two stars of the Norfolk system - and a cargo of Norfolk Tears would rake in several not-so-small fortunes, depending on how much he got.

The main problem had been that, as a first-time captain, he'd need a way to break into the market. After some research, he'd decided to carry a load of wood to Norfolk.

Xander had started laughing - once the basic concepts behind interstellar trade were explained to him - and asked, "What the hell possessed you to do that?" Noticing the way the others twitched at the word 'possessed', he raised an eyebrow in inquiry.

"The possessed caused one of the worst crises in human history, Xander," Ione explained. "And that includes anything you faced. But all in good time."

"The technology level," Joshua said, answering Xander's question. "As I'm sure Ione has explained to you, there isn't a great deal of technology used here. In fact, wood is still used here for a lot of things. So I looked for the toughest wood in known space and found it on a newly settled stage one colony world called Lalonde."

When he arrived at Durringham - the capital of Lalonde and site of the only spaceport on the planet - he found himself in the middle of brewing trouble. According to rumour, the Ivets - Involuntary Transportees, convicts sent to colony worlds in the same way convicts were transported to America, Australia and New Zealand in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries - had started some sort of insurrection, and were advancing towards Durringham.

This had caused Joshua some trouble, but he had managed to locate a thousand tons of mayope wood - which was as hard as advertised - and left Lalonde for Norfolk, along with one passenger.

A young man by the name of Quinn Dexter.

The flight from Lalonde to Norfolk had been plagued by mysterious problems, extending the time in transit from four days to over a week. Frankly, Joshua had been glad to be rid of Dexter on arrival.

The mayope had worked its wonders, but that hadn't been the only miracle that Joshua had achieved.

During the negotiation process, Joshua had noticed that the agent's assistant - a young man by the name of Gideon Kavanagh, who had suffered the misfortune of having one arm amputated after an accident - was being strangely quiet. Acting on instinct, he'd offered Gideon a job on the _Lady Mac_, which he'd accepted.

The net result of that had been that Joshua's cargo was one thousand tons of the most expensive drink in known space, where most captains didn't get half of that, along with an invitation to his family's estate for Midsummer celebrations - Cricklade estate.

"And that's when I first met Louise," Joshua said warmly, turning a loving gaze at his wife, who returned it.

"And me!" Genevieve piped in.

"And you too, Gen," Joshua said with a chuckle.

It had been a grand time for them, with moonlit romance, a passionate affair, and a promise to return.

"He returned bearing gifts," Ione said with a smile. A gigantea - a tree that would eventually grow to over two hundred meters tall - seed from Lalonde, and a sailu - an impossibly cute miniature xenoc animal resembling a panda. "Actually the sailu was brought back before he left for Lalonde, but that's a minor detail," Ione added, still grinning. Joshua shot her an indignant look, which she ignored.

Joshua had devised a plan to use the mayope from Lalonde to make some _serious_ money, but those plans had been put on hold when outside events intervened.

A colonist-carrier starship had arrived from Lalonde. It seemed that the Ivet troubles on Lalonde had spiralled beyond the planet's governor to control, plus there were rumours that Laton had resurfaced on Lalonde, and he was seeking to hire a mercenary army to restore control. In the end, six blackhawks, nine Adamist independent traders and five thousand ground troops, including scout teams of combat boosted, had accepted contracts and set off, with the _Lady Mac_ being one of them.

Joshua intended to protect his interests on Lalonde.

Along with a mercenary scout team lead by one Reza Malin, Joshua had carried a reporter by the name of Kelly Tirrel, who'd... enticed... Joshua to allow her passage.

When they arrived, and the scout teams had been landed, things had gone pear-shaped in a hurry.

Some of the spaceplanes had been hijacked after landing their scout teams, which in turn lead to some of the starships themselves being hijacked. Things only got worse when a Confederation Navy squadron arrived, with an arrest order for the _Lady Mac_.

"That surprised the hell out of us," Joshua said. "But we had more important things to worry about."

Such as the fact that two blackhawks had now been hijacked, and a brisk battle had broken out, with combat wasp salvoes flying on all sides. One of the Navy ships had been destroyed, then a voidhawk, then two more frigates had been destroyed when one of the mercenary ships had activated its patterning nodes while still in a gravity well, resulting in an explosion that rivalled that of an antimatter combat wasp.

That was of minor importance to Joshua, though, as a salvo of combat wasps had locked on to the _Lady Mac_. Unable to break for a higher orbit to jump away, he'd opted for the only other available direction.

Down.

At an acceleration of nine gravities, he'd taken the _Lady Mac_ on a trajectory that grazed the upper edges of Lalonde's atmosphere. The combat wasps, blindly chasing their target, had burned up in the atmosphere. Once on the other side of the planet, Joshua had jumped to Murora, intending to make hasty repairs before returning to Lalonde to pick up Kelly and the mercs.

However, he arrived just in time to see two of the hijacked starships shooting up the young habitat Aethra, having already destroyed the supervisory stations. After carrying out a hair-raising rescue of the surviving Edenists, he'd come to a depressing realisation.

He was trapped.

The two hijacked starships occupied higher orbits, so running straight up for a jump point was out of the question. Although the _Lady Mac_ could accelerate at eleven gravities, easily outpacing the two hijacked starships who seemed to be suffering unusual malfunctions in their drive systems, there were now young children on board, whose bodies would not be able to withstand prolonged periods of high gravity.

Once again, the only available direction had been down.

Joshua took up position in the rings of Murora, where he could hide for months if need be. Except that he'd promised to return for Kelly and the mercs. His intention had been to lurk in the rings until the two starships gave up and left, as in his last message to Kelly, he'd told her to hide out, and he'd expected her to be able to do so for a few days at least.

Then Kelly sent him a message, relayed through Aethra, and the whole situation changed, for they now knew who they were up against, and it wasn't as simple as Ivet rebellion, Laton, or a foreign invasion.

The souls of the dead, returning to possess the living. The possessed.

Xander's response to that was, "Huh?"

"While people are alive," Ione explained, "they generate this... energy, which has a pattern imprinted on it by human sentience. That's what a soul is... and don't look at me like that, Xander. Even the best scientists in the Confederation can't find a better explanation than that, so don't expect one from me."

Joshua picked up the explanation from there. "And when a person dies, the energy mostly dissipates, but some of it goes to another dimension, called the 'beyond'. The whole thing was kicked off by Quinn Dexter on Lalonde. It turns out that before he was transported to Lalonde, he was a member of a Light Bringer coven on Earth. It was one of their sacrifice ceremonies that opened the way to the beyond. But there was some unwitting help."

That 'help' had turned out to be a Ly-cilph, a member of a transcendent species who saw the reason behind existence to seek knowledge. As it had done in this case. However, it had gotten too close, and in attempting to probe the beyond, it provided a conduit for souls returning from the beyond.

The way someone was possessed was simple - and brutal. Unbearable pain was inflicted on the intended victim, until they broke and agreed to possession.

In fact, before the arrival of the mercenary squadron, both the Kulu External Security Agency and the Confederation Navy launched missions into the jungles of Lalonde, intending to find out what was happening. Both missions succeeded... sort of, and with a high price.

But the fact of the matter was that Joshua had to return to Lalonde as soon as possible, if not sooner, especially since Kelly and the mercs had rescued thirty children who needed picking up immediately. After some incredulity, it was decided to return.

That just left the problem of avoiding the two starships that were still searching for them long enough to get to a jump point. With the young children now in zero-tau, the _Lady Mac_ could now pull her maximum acceleration, but the minimum safe distance from a gas giant for a ZTT - Zero Temporal Transit, the Faster Than Light drive used by Adamist starships - was one hundred and seventy-five thousand kilometres.

A distance they had no chance of reaching.

There was another alternative. Close by was one of Murora's moons... and its Lagrange point.

A point where the conflicting gravity wells of both gas giant and moon cancel out, it was actually an area about two kilometres across, and it was _theoretically_ possible to complete a successful ZTT jump from one, but it had never been tried before - who'd be suicidal enough to?

Joshua was... well, desperate enough, anyway.

With the problem of a jump point out of the way, all attention was now focused on finding a way to avoid the searching starships. Joshua pointed out that if they timed it right, the _Lady Mac_ could make a break for it at a time when one of the starships was at the far end of the search zone and too far away for its combat wasps to reach the _Lady Mac_ in time. Which just left the other starship in a position to interfere.

Joshua proposed that someone go EV, taking a nuclear warhead from on of their combat wasps and place it on the starship's projected orbital track where it would be detonated when the time was ripe to cause the maximum damage and confusion. Warlow immediately volunteered for the job, citing his superior experience and overriding all other attempts.

Well, that was the plan, anyway.

Warlow threw a few spanners into the works when he unilaterally decided to manually move the nuke into the best position... and to detonate it manually.

Joshua and Ashly had protested, but they were unable to budge the cosmonik from his decision.

He detonated the nuke, sacrificing himself to give Joshua the best possible chance for escape.

Joshua had made the best of that chance, and reached the Lagrange point successfully, where he made a short jump of one billion kilometres, then jumped to the other side of the system, then returned to Lalonde - total elapsed time, eighty minutes.

Even then, he'd been just in time to rescue Kelly and the children, with the mercs sacrificing themselves in the face of an attacking horde of possessed to give them more time to escape.

The return trip to Tranquillity had been a solemn affair - except for the rescued children - as they contemplated the sacrifices made to achieve even this level of success.


	6. Joshua's Tale 2 of 3

**_Title: In Their Shadow_**

**_Author: Robert Cox (smeghead_76@dodo.com.au)_**

**_Disclaimer: Buffy is owned by Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy productions. The Night's Dawn trilogy is owned by Peter F. Hamilton. At least until the copyright runs out, anyway. Since that won't happen for a long time at the least, I've just gotta hope that no-one takes offence._**

**_Summary: Xander has been transported to the 27th century. Can he adapt to life in the future? Can he ever return home? And, more to the point, can the guy stay out of trouble for once?_**

**_Rating: M-15+ (Australian system)_**

**_AN: Thanks to Grossclout, who volunteered for beta-ing duties in the later parts._**

**_AN2: There are a couple of non-standard methods of communication used in this story, represented as follows:_ Affinity _ and _**{Datavises}

**_AN3: This is basically a summarisation of 'The Neutronium Alchemist' - the second part of the Night's Dawn trilogy - dressed up as Joshua telling his story to Xander. If anyone's feeling keen enough to read it, I can't recommend it enough. Questions like, 'Why was Louise so keen to get to Earth?' will be answered. Be warned, though - it's not for the faint-hearted, as it runs to something over 1200 pages. By comparison, 'The Lord of the Rings' tops out at just over 1000._**

* * *

Joshua paused to take a sip of his drink, and Xander said, "Woah... that's some story."

"You ain't heard the half of it," Joshua responded. "It gets worse from there."

"Hang on, I do have _one_ question, though."

"Shoot."

"Well... it's this. You say that when people die, they go to this 'beyond' thing you mentioned. But when Angelus was trying to open Acathla, what was on the other side certainly _wasn't_ empty nothingness. And I'm pretty certain that that's the case for the other side of the Hellmouth, as well."

Ione fielded this question. "They probably connect to other dimensions that are separate from the beyond. After all, the beyond proves the existence of other dimensions, and who said there can't be more?"

Xander nodded. "Good point. On with the story, then."

"Well, when we got back to Tranquillity, we didn't exactly get the warmest of receptions. Paranoia was the order of the day, which wasn't surprising, considering..."

********

Even before they docked, they found out an awful truth - that the possessed had already left Lalonde and were spreading throughout the Confederation. That had dampened their moods even more. After all they'd been through, the possessed were on the loose.

In fact, they'd already left their mark in two significant places.

On Atlantis, an ocean world and the only planet colonised by Edenists, they'd taken over one of the bitek islands germinated by the Edenists. Laton's body had been one of those possessed, but he'd managed to transfer to the island's neural structure, where he wrested control back from the soul who'd been possessing him. In the end, though, he'd been forced to destroy the island in order to prevent the possessed from overrunning the rest of the planet.

And in the habitat Valisk, the possessed had quickly gained control there, although the habitat personality was still in charge of the neural structure.

The bad news didn't stop there, however. Valisk was where the first blackhawks had been gestated, and although Tranquillity had become the premiere blackhawk base in the Confederation, considerable numbers of the bitek starships had been based there.

The possessed had captured the lot of them, and had managed to possess the blackhawks themselves, renaming them hellhawks.

Even the praise that had been heaped on the crew of the _Lady Mac_ for their 'heroic' rescues of the Edenists from Aethra and the children from Lalonde hadn't improved their moods to any great extent as they came to terms with both the loss of a fellow crew-member and the implications of the possessed. Not even the lavish praise heaped on Joshua for the amazing piloting skills he'd shown in pulling off the Lagrange point stunt - along with a new nickname, 'Lagrange' Calvert - had raised his spirits to any great degree. After all, he'd known what would have happened if he'd made even the _slightest_ mistake, been off-course by even a _fraction_ of a degree.

Events outside Tranquillity began to pick up pace as well. Louise told Xander of the arrival of Quinn Dexter at Cricklade, and the horrors unleashed as he began to open the inhabitants for possession. The rest of Kesteven Island had been racked by the same sort of civil disturbances that had troubled Lalonde - and it was now obvious that the possessed were loose on the world. Louise and Genevieve barely managed to escape the clutches of the possessed at the manor, and met up with one of the Romany who worked at Cricklade, whose name was Carmitha.

For a moment, it seemed that they were about to be caught anyway, as they'd encountered another group of possessed, but then help had come from an unexpected source.

One of the possessed had stepped forward to defend Louise and Genevieve, who'd been insulted by another of the possessed. Through sheer strength of will, he'd managed to back the rest of the group off. Introducing himself as Titreano, he'd sworn to help Louise and Genevieve reach the planetary capital, Norwich, with the first stage of the journey being to the aerodrome at Bytham, where it would be possible to obtain transportation for the remainder of the journey to the capital.

It had been an eight-hour voyage, and nerves rubbed raw by what had already happened, and further stressed by the uncertainty of might happen before they arrived at Bytham, had snapped more than once, resulting in an unhappy trip.

But they'd reached Bytham in safety, and had managed to take off, heading towards Norwich. Carmitha had decided to remain behind, and head for where the rest of the Romanies were going to seek shelter.

During the flight, Louise had quizzed Titreano about his true identity. It turned out that 'Titreano' had simply been a name that he had assumed late in his life. His true name had been Fletcher Christian, naval officer and second-in-command of the sailing ship HMS _Bounty_.

Mutineer.

This was were Joshua picked up the thread of the story again, telling of how, in the mad rush to evacuate the Kulu embassy staff from Lalonde, three possessed had managed to get to Ombey, which was the nearest Principality of the Kulu Kingdom to Lalonde, and where the Lalonde embassy staff had been evacuated to. He told of the fierce opening skirmishes - the police still not knowing exactly what they were facing - as the possessed increased their numbers. Two of the three had been eliminated - at a steep cost in the terms of numbers of lives lost - but the third had escaped... and the possessed were at large on the Mortonridge peninsular of the Xingu continent on Ombey.

The focus of the story then shifted to New California, where the possessed had been building up their numbers stealthily, with the police and intelligence agencies working themselves into a lather trying to get a handle on them, let alone stop them. Once again, the defenders had been hampered by their lack of knowledge about what they were facing.

The situation had been precariously poised until the possessed gained a leader - in the form of Al Capone.

"Woah, woah, woah. Waitaminnit. Are you trying to tell me that the leader of the possessed on New California was Al Capone?" Xander interrupted. "Chicago gangster, had quite a few movies made about him, _that_ Al Capone?"

"You bet," Joshua replied. "Remember, the only qualification required to get into the beyond is to be... well, dead. So, it was inevitable that someone like Capone would come back. I'm just glad it wasn't someone like Napoleon Bonaparte, Erwin Rommel or Richard Saldana." At the mention of her ancestor's name, the man who'd led the expedition to Kulu, Ione shot a mock-glare Joshua's way, and in response Joshua shrugged.

"Oh, okay," Xander said. When he thought about it, it made sense. "It was just a surprise, that's all."

"Don't worry about it, Xander," Ione said. "It came as a nasty shock to us at the time, as well."

"There's one thing I haven't really mentioned yet," Joshua added. "And that's what the possessed could do. You see, the beyond is pretty much pure energy, and each possessing soul still kept their connection to the beyond. The difference in energy levels bled through that link, allowing the possessed to do some pretty amazing things."

"For starters, they mucked up anything electronic around them," Ione added.

A penny dropped for Xander. "Which is why the trip from Lalonde to Norfolk was so trouble-plagued," he said. "Which would mean that Quinn Dexter was possessed when you met him."

"Exactly," Joshua said. "Of course, I didn't know it at the time, and later, he managed to overcome the possessing soul, but retain control of a possessed's abilities."

"Which were?" Xander asked.

"Well, they could throw this white fire," Joshua said, rubbing his right hand as if it itched. "They could change their appearance, heal just about any wound that wasn't instantly fatal, mould matter to their will - simple things only, without moving parts, and certainly nothing too technological - and shrug off fire from energy weapons, up to a point, that is."

Xander was amazed. "How?"

Joshua and Ione shrugged, almost in unison. "No-one knows," Ione said. "The best answer anyone has come up with is that the same energy that make up our souls is present in just about everything else - in much smaller amounts, obviously - and because the possessed could manipulate that energy, that meant that they could also manipulate whatever was containing that energy."

Xander thought about that for a moment. "That makes sense, I suppose," he said slowly, and a little to his surprise, it actually _did_ make sense. _Maybe all those years of listening to the G-man's lectures paid off_, he thought. A slight pang struck him as he wondered how the gang was coping with his disappearance.

Joshua continued with the story. "Well, Capone displayed the same sort of strategic flair that saw him become top gangster in Chicago when he went straight for the top."

Capone had decided that the problem with how the possessed were going about things was that they lacked organisation, thus giving the government a chance to pick them off piecemeal. Gathering a select few of the possessed in New California's capital, San Angeles, he'd infiltrated City Hall before the bulk of the governmental employees arrived for the day's work, and possessed the handful of workers who were already there.

Summoning the other possessed in San Angeles, Capone swiftly seized City Hall, and the first major government within the Confederation had fallen to the possessed.

Meanwhile, on Ombey, the government had reacted, declaring a state of emergency and martial law across Mortonridge, and having discovered the exact nature of what they were facing.

"Hang on," Xander protested. "Why all the jumping around?"

"I'm trying to tell the story in roughly the same order as it happened," Joshua pointed out. "That means that shifts are going to have to be necessary."

"Fair enough, I suppose."

Mortonridge was put under close surveillance by orbital Strategic Defence satellites, and any vehicle that left a town would be directed to a holding area, where they would be searched. Failure to comply would result in the orbiting SD weapons platforms firing on the vehicle. Once in the holding area, the passengers would have to wait until they could be tested for possession. Once again, failure to comply would result in SD fire.

"That seems a bit harsh," Xander commented.

"Well, remember what they were up against," Louise pointed out. "The authorities on Ombey thought that was the only way they could handle the situation."

In the towns themselves, a curfew would be enforced, with no-one apart from the police - who would enforce the curfew, assisted by the SD satellites - allowed on the streets. If anyone was caught breaking the curfew, they would be given exactly one chance to surrender, with weapons engagement authorisation given to the police.

"Basically, shoot to kill," Xander commented.

"Well, they'd seen what the possessed were capable of. To them, it seemed like the only thing they could do," Ione said.

Once that was in place, the evacuation of Mortonridge began. The plan called for Kulu Marines to encircle each town, along with police reserves, and a house-to-house sweep conducted, with each person tested for possession. Non-possessed would be relocated, whereas possessed would be given a stark choice: surrender the body they were possessing or go into zero-tau.

"Huh?" Xander said, perplexed. "What's so bad about going into zero-tau?"

"Well, Xander, when you... went into zero-tau, you didn't notice a thing until the pod was powered down," Ione explained. Xander nodded at that, leaving alone the issue that he hadn't gone into zero-tau voluntarily for the moment. "But for the possessing soul, it's the worst form of sensory deprivation. You see, the possessing soul is _fully_ aware of the passing of time, but all their other senses are cut off. To them, it's _worse_ than the beyond, as bad as _that_ was for them. Although the beyond is a sensory wasteland, they could at least... acquire... memories and experiences from the other souls they encountered there."

Xander nodded, accepting that. "So, they were basically faced with two nasty choices," he said.

"That's right," Joshua confirmed. "They could go back to the beyond of their own accord, or get put into zero-tau, where they would eventually crack from sensory deprivation and go back to the beyond anyway. Not much of a choice, really."

"Wasn't anyone trying to solve the problem in other ways?" Xander asked.

Ione chuckled mirthlessly. "Just every man and his dog, Xander. The churches were trying to figure out what the existence of souls and the beyond meant in their terms, and the scientists were trying to figure out the physics behind it. Even I was supporting efforts." When Xander shot a confused glance at her, she clarified by saying, "It turned out that the electronics stack that Joshua found was crammed full of recorded Laymil memories, and a lot of them showed that they were in the throes of a similar possession crisis. In fact, the habitats around Mirchusko had chosen suicide of submission to the Laymil possessed.

"And even stranger, it turned out that the Laymil home planet had been located in the same system after all. It... just wasn't there any more."

"What? _How_?"

"There's one more ability the possessed had. When enough possessed got together, they were capable of cleanly removing a planet from this universe, and taking it to another dimension." Xander shot her an incredulous look, and she continued, "Don't look at me like that, Xander. That's what happened to Unimeron - the Laymil homeworld - and to quite a few planets in the Confederation, as well."

"So, this sort of thing didn't just apply to humans, then," Xander said, 

"Nope," Joshua said. "Apparently, the Kiint went through something similar as well, but they wouldn't say what the way was to deal with it."

"Why not?" Xander asked. "Oh, and what's a Kiint?"

"To answer your first question," Joshua replied, "they said that we had to come to our own solution, which was true, as you'll discover later in the story. And to answer your second question, the Kiint are a xenoc species. An adult Kiint is about eight metres long, two high at the shoulder, and walks on eight legs. Their heads are roughly triangle-shaped, with eyes at the sides, and six gill-like breathing slits instead of a nose. It's assumed that their mouths are behind their chins, as no-one's ever seen them eat.

"They don't speak - any sort of language, although they can use processor blocks to communicate with humans - instead using something like affinity to communicate amongst themselves, and they can use affinity to communicate with Edenists and other people with affinity."

"They're also extremely intelligent and dignified, which is not surprising when you take into account the fact that they've been civilised for something like two hundred thousand years," Ione put in.

"T-two... hundred... _thousand_... years??" Xander stammered, unable to wrap his head around the concept.

"Something like that," Ione agreed. "But that's a guess. It could be longer, it could be shorter."

Xander's mouth opened and shut a few more times without making any sounds, as he struggled to come to terms with what he'd heard.

"But it's only the adults that act dignified and solemn. Young Kiint are much more playful, and well... just damned _cute_," Ione added with a grin.

"You mean Haile?" Joshua asked with a chuckle. "Yeah, she could get excitable."

"She sure enjoyed swimming at the beach in Tranquillity," Ione recalled. "But, back to the story. Where were we again?"

"The efforts to find a solution," Xander reminded her.

"That's right. Anyway, after finding out what had happened to Unimeron, I sent the Laymil Project to Avon to report his findings to the Confederation Navy which, out of necessity, was taking the lead in fighting a holding action against the possessed until a proper solution could be found. I don't really know what happened, but he came back with a team of Navy researchers to help speed up the search through the recorded Laymil memories, because some of the memories showed the Laymil possession crisis."

On Ombey, the evacuation had gone fairly well, except in one place - the small town of Exnall.

A journalist, bitter about the lack of prospects in the town, had learned about the curfew and had datavised _everyone_ in the town, resulting in a mob of people descending on the police station, demanding to know what was going on. Naturally, several possessed had been in the crowd, and things had gone pear-shaped from there.

Unfortunately, this had happened before the Marines were able to deploy around the town, and the possessed had managed to break out again, moving through the forests surrounding Exnall, skirmishing with the Marines, who were now just arriving.

Then the third of the three possessed from the embassy staff had revealed herself and, after proving that the possessed were now in a position to control the entire Mortonridge peninsular, offered cease-fire terms until the crisis was resolved, one way or another. With some reluctance, terms were agreed to, and the military pulled out of Mortonridge, with no other alternative than to essentially abandon the peninsula's two million inhabitants to be possessed, although some had managed to escape.

Then a brand new crisis had erupted. Doctor Alkad Mzu, a Garissan scientist, had escaped.

"What's so bad about that?" Xander asked.

"Well, to answer that question, you need to know a little background," Ione replied. "Thirty-three years ago, scoutships from two planetary systems, Garissa and Oumta, discovered a star system which contained asteroids with an incredible metal purity - the Dorados. The trouble was, they immediately started squabbling over who discovered them _first_ and would thus have the development rights."

"Couldn't they share?" Xander asked, perplexed. "I mean, there _was_ enough to go around, wasn't there?"

"Oh, sure," Ione replied. "More than enough, in fact. But both governments got greedy. It started off with development ships being attacked by 'pirates', then asteroid bases in each system were attacked, and then Omuta upped the stakes by using antimatter on a Garissan asteroid."

"From there, it went downhill rapidly. Doctor Mzu, who was working at a university at the time, designed a doomsday weapon, which she called the Neutronium Alchemist."

"What did it do?" Xander asked, intrigued.

"No-one knew at the time... and you'll have to wait to find out," Joshua answered. "But anyway, she was on a mission to deploy it, when the Garissan ships carrying out the mission were ambushed in interstellar space by Oumtan blackhawks. Of the three ships, one was destroyed, and the other two crippled.

"It got worse from there, as at that moment, the Omutans were launching their own attack, dropping a dozen antimatter planetbusters on Garissa. To give you an idea of how much devastation that caused, each planetbuster was equivalent to _one hundred million megatons_ of ordinary explosives, about the same amount as the asteroid which wiped out the dinosaurs on Earth. And the Omutans dropped twelve of them."

"Jesus," Xander said, looking vaguely queasy.

"It was genocide - in fact, that's how it's known in the history books; the Garissan Genocide. Out of a planetary population of ninety-five million, there were about three hundred thousand survivors."

"Holy shit," Xander whispered. "Antimatter can do that?"

"You bet, and not to mention that the _entire_ planet was strerilised... down to bacteria," Joshua said gravely. "To put it another way... okay, back in your time, nuclear weapons were the biggest, baddest things around, right?"

"Right."

"Well, antimatter leaves nukes for dead. Hell, _civilian_ craft - such as the _Lady Mac_ - can be armed with nuclear warhead-equipped combat wasps... missiles, Xander," Joshua explained. "So, nukes aren't uncommon."

"But if antimatter's so bad, why is it even available?" Xander asked.

"Well, the first commercial production of antimatter in the early twenty-third century was an attempt to break the Edenist Helium-3 monopoly - after all, there was still some uncertainty about how the Edenists would wield the clout that that gave them in times of crisis. Earth, especially, was dependant on the Helium-3 mined from Jupiter for _all_ of its energy needs. Because antimatter could also be used as a fuel for starships, it was seen as an alternative energy supply.

"But then someone used it as a weapon of mass destruction," Joshua continued. "Soon after, antimatter was outlawed - for _any_reason. If a starship was caught using it, the captain was shot on the spot, and the crew sent to a penal planet. No exceptions."

"Ahem," Ione said, looking pointedly at Joshua.

"Oh, all right... _one_ exception. But that's going to be told in its own time," Joshua corrected.

Xander thought about this for a moment. "Hang on," he said. "If antimatter was - and I'm assuming, still is - outlawed, how did the Omutans get their stash?"

"Criminal syndicates set up production stations in uninhabited systems," Ione explained. "Sort of like the drug cartels in your day."

"Okay, but that doesn't answer the question about _why_ her escaping - and why did she 'escape' rather than simply leave? - was such a bad thing."

"Well, after she simply reappeared, she came to Tranquillity. By this time, various governments had discovered the Alchemist's existence. No details were know, just that it was very bad. So they set up observation details on her, to ensure that she didn't try to retrieve it," Ione said. "But all that changed in a heartbeat.

"You see, the method of her escape was quite brilliant. A blackhawk actually swallowed _inside_ Tranquillity, retrieved her, and swallowed out again."

"I thought you said that blackhawks and voidhawks couldn't operate in a gravity well," Xander objected.

"They can't, but what's inside Tranquillity isn't true gravity. Sure, it works just like real gravity, but it isn't. That's what allowed the _Udat_ - the blackhawk that carried out the escape - to swallow in and out," Ione explained.

"Okay," Xander said. "That makes sense. Then what?"

"All of the Intelligence agencies set off in chase, activating assets all over the Confederation in the attempt to find her. Of course, it was assumed that she'd head for the Dorados, but they wanted to intercept her before then, if possible," Ione said. "I decided to send someone after her, as well."

"Yeah. Me," Joshua grumbled.

"Who else could I have sent?" Ione asked gently. "You were - and still are, for that matter - the person I trusted the most."

Louise rolled her eyes, but her grin showed that she wasn't worried. Joshua mock-scowled, and said to Xander, "See what I have to put up with?"

"Trust me, I know the feeling," Xander said with a smirk.

The focus of the story now shifted to the Sol system, where more detailed information was arriving, and a general Consensus called to deal with it. After Laton's last message was played for the Consensus, several decisions were made.

The first was to impose a similar quarantine to that the rest of the Confederation was imposing on interstellar flight, including assigning armed voidhawks recalled from commercial duties to the Confederation Navy.

The second was to direct the impressive scientific resources at Edenism's disposal towards finding the causes behind the crisis, and to finding a solution.

The third, and final, decision, was to prepare a fallback position - just in case the possessed achieved the upper hand.

Meanwhile, on Norfolk, Louise had reached Norwich in safety, and had taken refuge at her aunt's house. "Honestly," Louise said, "if I'd had any other choice, I wouldn't have gone there. Aunt Celina was _such_ an airhead, and as for her son..." She shuddered at the memory, and Joshua drew her into a comforting hug, while an expression of extreme distaste crossed Genevieve's face.

After a talk with Fletcher, she'd decided to leave Norfolk and head for Tranquillity, to find Joshua. Drawing on the estate's funds, she'd obtained a Jovian Bank disc, and made arrangements to secure passage on one of the naval ships in orbit around Norfolk.

"Jovian Bank disc?" Xander asked.

"Like the one I gave you, Xander," Ione replied, causing Xander to fish his own credit disc out of his pocket.

**You gave him money?** Joshua asked Ione.

**Yes.** Ione replied.

**How much?**

**Five million fuseodollars.**

**Why that much?**

**Compensation for the debrief nanonics, mainly, plus a reward for the information.**

"What are you two talking about?" Xander asked, breaking their train of thought.

"How did you know we were talking?" Ione responded, curious.

"Louise told me a bit about affinity," Xander said. "How it's basically telepathy, plus a couple of other details."

"Erm... I told him how much money I gave you," Ione said sheepishly.

"How much?" Genevieve asked, curious.

"Five million fuseodollars," Ione mumbled.

"Why?" Louise asked.

"Well... I kinda implanted him with a set of debrief nanonics," Ione replied, still mumbling.

"_Why_?" Louise repeated, shaper this time.

"Hey, I _did_ just appear from out of nowhere in the middle of Tranquillity," Xander said in Ione's defence. "She didn't know who or _what_ I was. No harm, no foul."

Both Louise and Genevieve nodded, so Joshua resumed the story. "At that time, the Confederation Assembly was meeting to formalise the response to the possessed. It was decided to formalise the quarantine on interstellar flight, and to proceed with the scientific investigation. It was then that the Tyrathca - another xenoc species - decided to break off all contact."

Once again, the story switched locations, this time back to New California. Capone had consolidated his control of the planet, and now switched his attention to clearing out the rest of the system. He already had control of half of New California's navy, along with combat-capable independent traders.

The operation was a complete success, and all of the asteroid settlements were occupied by the possessed, who also captured all but a handful of New California's navy ships.

Louise took over the story once more, shifting the story back to Norfolk. At Bennett Field, Norwich's aerodrome, she - along with Genevieve and Fletcher - was trying to find the spaceplane pilot for the _Far Realm_ - the ship she'd bought passage on - when she encountered Quinn Dexter again.

"It was terrible," she said, shuddering a little as the memory bore home. Beside her, Genevieve shook as well. "He was going to do terrible things to Gen and me, and when Fletcher tried to help us, Quinn attack him - hurt him badly." For some reason, Xander had no trouble picturing some of the things that Quinn Dexter might have done to Louise if he'd gotten the chance. Rage started to pound in his head. Louise continued, "He was about to... start hurting me, him and his cohort Lawrence, when someone intervened. I don't know who it was, but he saved Gen and me."

After that, they'd managed to find the _Far Realm_'s spaceplane, and lifted into orbit. However, Quinn Dexter and Lawrence managed to seize control of the spaceplane from another frigate, the _Tantu_, and then he seized control of the frigate itself.

"This Quinn Dexter guy sounds like a real raging psychopath," Xander commented. "And nasty, to boot."

"Xander, you have no idea," Ione said in all seriousness. "You haven't heard half of the stuff he did. I won't tell you exactly what he did, but I'll just say that he made Angelus and Spike - put together, no less - seem like nice guys. They may have terrorised a continent, but Quinn Dexter terrorised entire _planets_."

"Woah," was Xander's only response. It was hard to believe, but... he found himself unable to doubt Ione.

On Ombey, a plan had been devised to expel the possessed from the Mortonridge peninsular, but since the plan called for the use of Tranquillity serjeants in the front lines, the approval of Alistair II, King of Kulu was required.

When Ralph Hiltch, the ESA officer responsible for the plan, arrived on Kulu, he discovered that not even the heart of the Kulu kingdom was safe from the possessed, although the possessed on Kulu hadn't been able to consolidate their position like they head on Ombey. Having obtained approval from the King to acquire large numbers of serjeants, Hiltch was sent to Jupiter as part of a diplomatic mission to seek the Edenists' support, while another diplomatic mission was sent to Tranquillity to obtain the DNA sequence for the serjeants.

The Edenists, while reluctant, had decided to throw their weight behind the Liberation, and Ione had handed over the DNA sequence.

Back to New California... Capone was trouble enough as it was, but now he'd been told the location of an antimatter production station. To add to that, he also decided to attack the Edenists of the New California system, orbiting the gas giant Yosemite, with the intention of seizing the Helium-3 production systems.

Fortunately, the Edenists had been warned, and the thirty habitats mounted a vigorous defence with their armed voidhawk squadrons. The warships crewed by possessed were hampered enough by malfunctioning equipment, and when the fact that the Yosemite Consensus had been forewarned enough to lay combat wasp minefields was added, the result was inevitable.

The Organisation warships were massacred, in most cases without even managing to get a target lock on the attacking voidhawks, let alone return fire.

"So Capone wasn't much of a threat after that, then?" Xander asked.

"Hell, yes he was," Joshua replied. "Even though he didn't capture the Helium-3 cloudscoops around Yosemite, there was still years' worth of supplies on New California and the asteroid settlements. Also, deuterium can be used by itself as a fuel. Sure, it does bad things to the drive tubes, but it'll still work."

Louise picked up the story again, telling of how she, Gen and Fletcher had watched as the red cloud had spread over Norfolk.

"Red cloud?" Xander asked.

"It was something created by the possessed," Ione explained. "When it covered an entire planet, it meant that the possessed were in control, and could remove that planet from the universe. Of course, that wasn't really necessary, just enough possessed on a planet."

"Hey!" Joshua protested. "No getting ahead of the story."

"Sorry," Ione apologised.

While the _Far Realm_ was still in Norfolk orbit, the Confederation squadron received a message about the nature of the situation on the planet, and the squadron commander decided to leave one ship in place to enforce the quarantine, thus allowing the rest of the squadron to be deployed to other tasks. The _Far Realm_ was released from its contract, and allowed to return to Mars.

Arriving at Phobos - one of the moons of Mars, now used as an industrial station - Louise and Genevieve bought new clothes to replace the possessions they'd been forced to abandon on Norfolk, along with processor blocks to allow them to fit in to more technological societies than the one on Norfolk. Due to the interstellar quarantine, they couldn't secure travel to Tranquillity - their intended destination - so they decided to go to Earth, instead.

Another problem was the fact that none of them had passports. This was easy enough to solve, although there was a nasty moment when Fletcher was revealed to be a possessed. Some quick thinking by Louise managed to retrieve the situation, and before too long, they had passport fleks, and were on an interplanetary ship on their way to Earth.

Louise's upbringing on Norfolk had been quite sheltered, which probably explained why she hadn't properly thought through the possible consequences of bringing Fletcher - a possessed - to Earth. Arriving at the High York asteroid, all three had been arrested and confined to separate cells.

The repair and refit of the _Lady Mac_ was now complete, and Joshua set off in chase of Mzu, having found a new crew-member to replace Warlow. "She found me, I should say," Joshua said. "The fact that she just walked up to me about a minute after the memorial service for Warlow and the mercs had finished was a bit jarring, though. Since I was somewhat pressed for time, all I could really do was take her on."

"Her?" Xander asked with a raised eyebrow.

"Beaulieu's a cosmonik, Xander," Joshua replied with a grin.

"Oh." Joshua had explained cosmoniks to him, how they were people who spent prolonged periods in free-fall, but weren't geneered to withstand its effects the way that most people in the space industry - such as Joshua - were. As their bodies started to deteriorate, they first supplemented body parts with artificial enhancements, then supplements became replacements, until virtually the only organic tissue remaining was the brain. Since body shape was optional, more than a few cosmoniks abandoned human form altogether.

Carrying on, Joshua told of how he tracked Mzu to the Dorados, where he made a startling discovery - he had a brother.

Xander started chuckling at that. "Oh, man... he anything like you, Joshua?" he asked between snickers.

"Too much like me," Joshua sighed. "We didn't get off to the greatest of starts, since the first thing he did was to slap a legal claim on the _Lady Mac_, but we sorted things out eventually."

Meanwhile, Quinn Dexter made an attempt to infiltrate Earth, and was only stopped by the lack of an Armed Ship Authorisation code.

"What's that?" Xander asked.

"There's so much stuff in Earth orbit," Joshua explained, "that Govcentral - Earth's government - is terrified of what would happen if even one hostile ship was to launch a combat wasp salvo. So every ship that jumps into one of Earth's emergence zones has to have a code number authorising their presence."

"Wasn't the ship's captain possessed? I mean, wouldn't the possessor know what the code was?"

"Yes, and no. You see, Dexter didn't know about ASA codes, and neither did the soul possessing the _Tantu_'s captain, so they didn't try to extract it. Making a hasty exit, Dexter had to find somewhere to go to get a new ship. He decided to go to Nyvan, one of the earliest multi-ethnic colony worlds. And just to make it interesting, that's where Mzu was heading as well. And to make it even _more_ interesting, Capone had found out about the Alchemist as well, and had sent three ships after her."

"Multi-ethnic?" Xander asked.

"When the first terracomp planets were discovered, it was decided that the colonists sent to them would have a balanced proportion of all of Earth's ethnic groups," Ione explained. "Great idea, but after the initial excitement faded, all of the old hatreds resurfaced, and the four multi-ethnic worlds fragmented along the lines of ethnic groups. In the end, there were four new Earths, with all the tensions between ethnic groups being imported. When California sponsored a colony world for Californians only, it was controversial at first, but was soon taken up as the model of all new colony worlds, which kicked off the Great Dispersal."

"Getting off Ayacucho wasn't easy," Joshua continued the story. "The battle at Lalonde had been hairy enough, but that was where I had my first personal encounter with the possessed." He shuddered slightly at the memory before continuing. "Hearing the voices in the beyond, knowing that they would promise you anything to be let in..." He broke off and rubbed his right hand again.

Something went _click_ in Xander's mind. "How badly were you injured?" he asked.

"Some nasty burns on my hand," Joshua replied. "But the worst bit was _knowing_ that unless help came soon, that my choices were death or possession. Fortunately, help _did_ arrive in time."

There was a brief silence as everyone contemplated this. Then Xander asked, "What was happening in the rest of the Confederation during this?"

"Capone's Organisation invaded and conquered another planet, Arnstadt, and I found out that Norfolk had been overrun by the possessed," Joshua answered. "My first instinct was to head straight for Norfolk, but I managed to stick with the task at hand, something that was made harder when I heard that Norfolk had been removed from this universe."

"There was some worry that Capone would spread and conquer the entire Confederation," Ione added. "One estimate said that he'd do that in six months if he captured enough industrialised worlds."

Xander thought of some of the Big Bads he'd faced at Buffy's side over the years. _None_ of them had possessed that level of ability. Mayor Wilkins might have, but they'd managed to stop him before he could put his plans beyond Ascension into action.

One more question occurred to him. "How did Capone find out about the Alchemist?"

"One of the possessed on New California had worked with Mzu designing it," Ione answered. "And once Capone found out about the Alchemist's existence, he found one of the ship captains from the deployment mission, who knew where it was to be found. Another possessed - one of the _Udat_'s crew - knew where she had gone. He only sent ships to the Dorados to try to capture Mzu herself."

"How did the _Udat_'s crew end up in the beyond?"

"Mzu destroyed the _Udat_ after it dropped her off," Joshua replied. "As a security precaution, and the fact that the _Udat_ was one of the blackhawks that intercepted the deployment of the Alchemist was a nice bonus."

"Oh."

"Of course, the overall situation wasn't helped much when the Organisation invaded a _third_ system, Kursk."

"Jesus."

"Yeah, that was pretty much the general reaction, as well."

On Nyvan, Dexter had taken over three of the planet's handful of orbiting asteroids - a planet's prosperity was able to be gauged by the number of asteroids in orbit - and found a ship that would suit his purposes. Of course, he didn't simply take the ship and leave. Oh, no.

While all this was going on, Joshua _finally_ managed to track down Mzu. Unfortunately, so had the Organisation. After a dramatic rescue, which included being picked up by Ashly just in time to dodge a rock hurled down from orbit by the Organisation ships - following the principle of "if we can't have her, neither can you" - he managed to reach orbit.

However, in the process of escape, he'd lost another crew-member, Melvyn Ducharme.

Given that, the fact that there was now a small war in progress in orbit seemed almost anticlimactic.

Breaking away from the conflict, the _Lady Mac_ was headed for a jump point when Dexter's plan revealed itself. Apart from seeding the nations on Nyvan with possessed, he'd also rigged the three asteroids he controlled with nuclear warheads. As the _Mount's Delta_ left Nyvan orbit, headed for Earth, he detonated the nukes.

All three asteroids split apart, showering the surface of the planet with debris, and rendering the planet uninhabitable.

"Jesus," Xander said again, looking somewhat queasy. "I was right. That guy _is_ a raging psychopath."

Joshua nodded. "That's right. And to make matters worse, he was a _smart_ psychopath," Joshua said. "He didn't make too many mistakes, and the grand finale he was building up for? Well, let's just say that 'apocalyptic' would have been a good way to describe it."

"He was stopped, though, right?" Xander asked.

"Yeah, but it wasn't easy," Joshua replied. "And no, I'm not going to tell you how, either. You're going to have to wait until the story ends."

"Damn," Xander mumbled. "So to sum up so far; the souls of the dead were busily taking over the living, Louise and Gen were locked up in the O'Neill Halo, a superpowered psychopath was headed towards Earth with the intent of doing something nasty - and you won't tell me what - and you were about to head off in search of a doomsday weapon, leaving a dead world behind you," he continued in a more normal tone of voice.

"Something like that, yeah, but Dexter actually managed to get to Earth's surface," Joshua replied. "And there wasn't much searching involved. I went straight to where the Alchemist was located. What had happened was that, after the Alchemist deployment mission was intercepted, the survivors managed to get one of the surviving ships up to jump-capable status, while the other one was loaded up with as much antimatter as its confinement chambers could hold, and pointed at the nearest star, while the crew went into zero-tau to wait until help arrived."

"Bloody hell," Xander muttered, awed at the prospect of flying interstellar distances at sublight speeds.

"It took them twenty-eight years to make the trip," Joshua continued. "When we showed up, they were pretty suspicious at first, but I managed to talk them out of doing something stupid."

The rendezvous with the _Beezling_ - the ship carrying the Alchemist - was fairly simple, but the decay caused by thirty years of exposure to space had complicated docking.

And to make matter worse - almost as if to prove that the universe had a sick sense of humour - two Organisation frigates had shown up. Once again, Joshua was pinned against a planet by enemies in a higher orbit. His first idea - firing the Alchemist at the two frigates - was physically impossible, and simply brute-forcing the navigation computer wasn't turning up anything useful... not even a Lagrange point.

Deciding to accept the consequences for knowing how the Alchemist worked, Joshua decided to use it against the gas giant they were orbiting, and his crew started the process for loading it on one of the _Lady Mac_'s combat wasps.

"What was so bad about knowing how it worked?" Xander wanted to know.

"That was one of the reasons behind the whole chase. Not only was I to prevent her from deploying it, I had to make sure that no-one else - especially the possessed, _particularly_ Capone - found out how to build one," Joshua replied.

"Fair enough. Is this the time when I find out what it did; why it was so dangerous?"

"The Alchemist used a combination of zero-tau technology and a ZTT node to warp space-time around it, creating a pocket of ludicrously strong gravity," Joshua explained. "Depending on the setting, it could either suck a star into a small black hole, or make it go nova."

"Make it go... you mean, _explode_?" Xander asked, incredulous.

"Yep," Joshua replied, before continuing with the story. "While the Alchemist was being loaded on a combat wasp, some of the antimatter was loaded into the _Lady Mac_'s antimatter drive."

"I thought you said that antimatter is illegal," Xander protested.

"Owning antimatter is," Joshua agreed. "But owning a ship with an antimatter _drive_ isn't - so long as you don't use it."

"Which is what you were doing," Xander pointed out.

"There didn't seem to be much choice at the time," Joshua said. "Using the antimatter drive, the _Lady Mac_ can hit forty-two gees acceleration and, as it turned out, I really needed that."

By the time the Alchemist was loaded, the Organisation warships were starting to get perilously close. Abandoning the _Lady Mac_'s spaceplane and MSV - Multifunction Service Vehicle - the crew prepped the ship for high gees. Once that was complete, Joshua fired a combat wasp salvo at the gas giant. Since the Alchemist was on one of those anonymous combat wasps, intercepting and retrieving it was impossible.

Joshua activated the antimatter drive and the _Lady Mac_ crossed the terminator at one hundred and fifty kilometres per second. The two Organisation frigates exploded behind them, caught in a superheated torrent of hydrogen - so hot that it was almost plasma - spewing from the tortured inner layers of the planet.

Just as the _Lady Mac_ jumped clear of the system, the gas giant went nova.

Arriving back at Tranquillity, Joshua learned that the worst wasn't over yet.

"What do you mean?" Xander asked.

"While Joshua was chasing Mzu," Ione replied. "The Confederation learned that Capone planned to invade a fourth system, Toi-Hoi. Since Tranquillity was fairly close, I was asked to allow it to be used as a supply base and rendezvous point. Unfortunately, Capone learned that the Confederation Navy had learned of his plans, and sent his fleet to Tranquillity instead. Since only some of the Confederation forces had arrived, Capone's fleet outnumbered them. And since the Organisation fleet had antimatter combat wasps, the Confederation squadron was grossly outgunned, as well.

"To make things even _worse_, Valisk's hellhawks had joined Capone."

"Ouch," Xander muttered. "But you got away, right?"

Ione nodded. "The Organisation ships fired off a massive salvo of combat wasps, aimed at Tranquillity, and I was forced to reveal Tranquillity's secret - the fact that it could make swallow manoeuvres."

"You mean like a voidhawk or blackhawk," Xander asked, amazed. "How?"

"The same way as a voidhawk or blackhawk does, Xander," Ione replied. "There's a lot of energy-patterning cells at Tranquillity's southern endcap. My grandfather thought it'd be a good idea, in case whatever destroyed the Laymil came after Tranquillity. He wanted the ability to run away if necessary."

"Good idea," Xander said, still a little awestruck at the concept.

"Yeah, but I didn't know that at the time," Joshua muttered. "So imagine how I felt, arriving home only to find a whole lot of combat wasp debris, but no Tranquillity - not even as wreckage."

Ione didn't reply to that comment, but simply smiled sweetly at him. Louise rolled her eyes, and glanced at the clock on the wall. "It's time we took a break for dinner," she announced. "The story can be finished afterwards."

Reminded of the existence of food, Xander's stomach growled. "No arguments from me, Louise," he said, rather sheepishly.


	7. Joshua's Tale 3 of 3

**_Title: In Their Shadow - Chapter 11_**

**_Author: Robert Cox (smeghead_76@dodo.com.au)_**

**_Disclaimer: Buffy is owned by Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy productions. The Night's Dawn trilogy is owned by Peter F. Hamilton. At least until the copyright runs out, anyway. Since that won't happen for a long time at the least, I've just gotta hope that no-one takes offence._**

**_Summary: Xander has been transported to the 27th century. Can he adapt to life in the future? Can he ever return home? And, more to the point, can the guy stay out of trouble for once?_**

**_Rating: M-15+ (Australian system)_**

**_AN: Thanks to Grossclout, who volunteered for beta-ing duties in the later parts._**

**_AN2: There are a couple of non-standard methods of communication used in this story, represented as follows:_ Affinity _ and _**{Datavises}

**_AN3: This is basically a summarisation of 'The Naked God' - the third part of the Night's Dawn trilogy - dressed up as Joshua telling his story to Xander. If anyone's feeling keen enough to read it, I can't recommend it enough. Questions like, 'Was Quinn Dexter *really* a raging psycopath?' will be answered. Be warned, though - it's not for the faint-hearted, as it runs to something over 1200 pages. By comparison, 'The Lord of the Rings' tops out at just over 1000._**

**_AN4: On a number of occasions, there are direct quotations from the book, used as 'Flashback' scenes. They were just too good to resist :)_**

* * *

As Xander was polishing off the last remnants of his meal, he asked Ione, "So, where did Tranquillity end up?"

"In orbit around Jupiter," Ione answered. "Which caused some stir with the Jovian Consensus, I might add," she added with a grin.

"Why's that?"

"A _habitat_ that's able to carry out a swallow manoeuvre?"

"Good point," Xander conceded.

"The people living in Tranquillity were understandably happy that it was possible, though..."

"Actually, given how heavily fortified the Jovian habitats were, dropping by unexpectedly like that might not have been that good an idea, in hindsight," Ione said thoughtfully. "Consensus had deployed one-point-seven _million_ combat wasps in a defensive minefield, and over fifteen _thousand_ voidhawks had been assigned as a Home Defence fleet."

"Fif-fifteen _thousand_?" Xander spluttered, eyes wide.

"Only the Edenists know for sure how many voidhawks there are,Xander," Ione explained. "And they're not telling anyone. Hundreds of thousands, certainly, maybe even millions. So using fifteen thousand to protect the heart of Edenism and the energy supply of Earth sounds reasonable, particularly when you take into consideration the fact that Consensus was worried about the possibility of the Alchemist falling into Capone's hands."

"Needless to say, Capone was not amused by the affair," Joshua put in. "And now would probably be a good time to return to the sitting room."

Once they'd returned to the sitting room and made themselves comfortable, Ione picked up the thread of the story. "There was also one other unexpected event. One of the many things the Kiint hadn't revealed about themselves was their ability to... well, basically, teleport. When Tranquillity came under attack, but before Tranquillity swallowed to Jupiter, all of the Kiint living in Tranquillity suddenly teleported out. Haile - the young Kiint we mentioned earlier - was one of them, and she did something unexpected.

"After Joshua returned from Lalonde with the children that had been rescued from the possessed, I'd befriended one of them, a young girl named Jay Hilton. I'd also introduced her to Haile, and the two had become good friends.

"When the Kiint used their teleport ability to evacuate Tranquillity, Haile took Jay with her to the Kiint home system. She defied her parents, all because Jay was her friend," Ione explained.

"Woah," Xander said softly, amazed at the show of friendship. "And what were you doing when all of this was going on, Joshua?"

"I decided to go to Avon, more specifically, Trafalgar - the asteroid that serves as the headquarters for the Confederation Navy - to let the First Admiral decide what to do next. There was one little hitch, though..."

**_*Flashback*_**

Sarha grinned round phlegmatically. "How many medals do you think they'll give us apiece?"

"Uh-oh," Liol grunted. "However many it is, we might be getting them posthumously. I think one of the frigates has just realised our antimatter drive is ever so slightly highly radioactive."

**_*End Flashback*_**

"... given that as far as the Confederation knew, only the Organisation was using antimatter - combined with the fact that, even at the best of times, antimatter is highly illegal - we were expecting to be shot at at any moment.

"However some fast talking, especially from Samuel - the Edenist Intelligence operative who'd tagged along since Nyvan - ensured that we were allowed to approach and dock." He paused and grinned before continuing, "I can still remember the look on Samuel's face when he told me the approach vector and added, 'And Joshua, don't deviate from it. Please.'"

Xander started chuckling as his imagination pictured the serious-shading-to-pleading expression that must have been on the Edenist's face. The chuckles turned to outright laughter when Joshua added, "Of course, my response was to wink and say, 'What, Lagrange Calvert fly off line?'"

After allowing Xander to stop laughing and regain his breath, Joshua continued more seriously, "Of course, that wasn't the end of it. Once everyone had disembarked from the _Lady Mac_, we were separated and ushered to what was basically a VIP prison, with Ashly, Liol - my brother - and me sharing a _very_ comfortable room."

Meanwhile, events were picking up pace in the rest of the Confederation. On Earth, Quinn Dexter was seeking out the Light Bringer sects, starting in the New York arcology. His goal was simple - he intended to seed the arcologies with possessed, and as he'd used to belong to a Light Bringer coven in Edmonton, they were the logical place to start. The fact that he was also seeking vengeance against Banneth, his former Magus, was simply a bonus.

With sheer brutality, he'd found the sect headquarters for the New Manhattan dome and taken over. Of course, his arrival on Earth had not gone unnoticed, and a shadowy Govcentral Internal Security Division agency known only as Bureau Seven - B7 for short - decided that Dexter posed a threat to the safety of Earth, and began planning to eliminate him, although they expressed concern about a new ability that he'd learned on Nyvan... the ability to become invisible.

Hearing that, Xander spluttered incredulously, "How the hell did he manage that?"

"Apparently, he was able to enter something called the 'ghost realm', which is not _quite_ another dimension, but close. The reason that it's called the ghost realm is that it's populated by... well, ghosts," Joshua replied.

"Funny, that," Xander said with a perfectly straight face, causing the others to chuckle lightly.

"That was how Dexter managed to get past the security checks on Earth," Joshua added.

"How did B7 know what Dexter'd been up to?" Xander asked.

"While in the O'Neill Halo, I was implanted with a set of debrief nanonics, though I didn't know it at the time," Louise replied.

"So _that's_ why you took the news that Ione had implanted me with a set of debrief nanonics badly," Xander said in realisation.

Louise nodded, and said to Ione, "I'm sorry about that. I didn't mean to snap at you."

"Don't worry about it, Louise," Ione said, waving aside Louise's apology.

"So, let me make sure I've got this straight. Quinn Dexter wasn't just a superpowered psychopath, he was an _invisible_ superpowered psychopath who intended to do nasty things on Earth on the scale of some of the nasties I faced alongside Buffy."

"Something like that," Ione agreed.

"Buh-loody hell," Xander muttered.

"B7 were planning to lure Dexter into a trap," Joshua said, getting the story back on track. "And, like all traps, they had bait."

"What was the bait?" Xander asked.

"Me and Gen," Louise replied.

Xander looked appalled at the callousness of that decision, so Joshua explained it. "Remember, they had an entire planet of forty _billion_ people to protect," he said.

Reminded of comparisons to the Acathla situation, where he'd lied to Buffy in order to safeguard six billion lives, Xander rethought his opinion. "Okay, so maybe they thought they had no real choice," he said. "But that doesn't mean that I'm going to like it."

Joshua shrugged. "It's in the past now, Xander."

After being thoroughly interviewed by CNIS investigators, Joshua was taken to see the First Admiral, who confirmed that he wasn't under arrest, and laid down some conditions; the first that he wasn't to discuss the Alchemist with anyone.

"But you just told me what it was and what it did," Xander pointed out.

"Whoops," Joshua replied with a grin and a shrug.

"It's not as if I'd tell anyone, anyway," Xander continued.

Joshua mopped his brow theatrically. "Whew. At least I won't get into trouble with the First Admiral."

Xander grinned and asked, "What were the other conditions?"

"Well, I wasn't to put myself in a position where I'd encounter the possessed again. Which wasn't a problem, as that was the _last_ thing I wanted to do," Joshua replied. "And third, I was to take Mzu to the Sol system, and stay there with her."

Realisation dawned on Xander. "Tranquillity?"

Joshua nodded. "Tranquillity."

"I bet you were happy to find out that Tranquillity was still around."

"You have no idea," Joshua said with a grin. "In fact, none of us could stop grinning as we docked, and when Ione met me at the starport..."

**_*Flashback*_**

...as soon as Joshua air-swam out from their airlock tube, Ione was in front of him, toes pressed with ballerina grace on the compartment's stikpad. Doubts about Liol vanished. She was wearing a simple maroon polka-dot summer dress, ruffled gold-blond hair floating daintily. It made her seem girlish and elegant all at once. The sight of her like that summoned up memories warmer than any neural nanonics catalogued recollections could ever be.

She grinned knavishly, and held out both hands. Joshua caught hold and let her gently secure him. They kissed, a tingle lost somewhere between just good friends and old lovers. "Well done," she whispered.

"Thanks, I..." He frowned when he saw who was waiting behind her. Dominique. Dressed in a tight sleeveless black leather T-shirt that was tucked into white sports shorts. All curves and blatant athleticism. As overt as Ione was demure.

"Joshua, darling!" Dominique squealed happily. "My God, you look so divine in a ship-suit. So well packaged. What can those naughty designers have been thinking of?"

"Er, hello, Dominique."

"Hello?" She pouted with tragic disappointment. "Come here, gorgeous."

Arms that were disproportionately strong wrapped around him. Wide lips descended happily, a tongue wriggling into his mouth. Hair and pheromones tickled his nose, making him want to sneeze.

He was too embarrassed to resist. Then she stiffened suddenly. "Oh _wow_, there's two of you."

The embrace was broken. Dominique stared hungrily behind him, long fronds of blond hair writhing about.

"Um, this is my brother," Joshua mumbled.

Liol gave her a languid grin, and bowed. It was a good manoeuvre considering he wasn't anchored to a stikpad. "Liol Calvert, Joshua's bigger brother."

"Bigger." Dominique's eyes reflected slivers of light like coquettish diamonds.

In some way he couldn't quite work out, Joshua was no longer between the two of them.

"Welcome to Tranquillity," Dominique purred.

Liol took a hand gently and kissed her knuckles. "Nice to be here. It looks spectacular so far."

A small groan of dismay rumbled up from Joshua's throat.

"There's plenty more to see, and it gets a whole lot better." Dominique's voice was so husky it was almost bass. "If you're willing to risk it, that is."

"I'm just a simple boy from a provincial asteroid; of course I'm looking forward to the delights of the big bad habitat."

"Oh, we have several bad things you'll never find in your asteroid."

"I can believe it."

She crooked a finger in front of his nose. "This way."

The two of them levitated out of the hatch together.

"Hmm." Ione smiled with sly contentment. "Eight seconds total; that's pretty fast even for Dominique."

Joshua looked back from the hatch to her amused blue eyes. He realised they were alone. "Oh, very neat," he remarked in admiration.

"Let's just say I had a premonition they might hit if off."

"She'll eat him alive. You know that, don't you?"

"You never complained."

**_*End Flashback*_**

By the time Joshua had finished recounting Liol and Dominique's meeting, Xander was slumped in his seat, nearly helpless with laughter. "Oh man, that's _priceless_," he gasped. "Dominique makes Faith look like a shy girl." The laughter stopped abruptly as something Ione said earlier clicked in his mind. "And you want to introduce me to her?" he asked incredulously. When Ione nodded, he said, "Ione Saldana, you are a cruel, cruel woman."

With that, everyone else started laughing. "Don't worry, Xander," Ione said with a huge cat-with-a-flock-of-crippled-canaries grin. "I'll tell her to go easy on you."

"Why doesn't that make me feel much better?" Xander muttered, which set everyone else off again.

"Probably because you're a suspicious, cynical person who might be slightly paranoid?" Louise asked innocently.

"You say that as if it was a bad thing," Xander replied with a grin, which caused a new round of snickers. "What was happening in the rest of the Confederation?"

"Gen and I were released from custody in the O'Neill Halo, and deported to Earth. After riding the African orbital tower to the surface, we decided to head to London. I never knew one place could be so crowded. But then again, I suppose it was inevitable, given the fact that I was in one of Earth's busiest transport hubs, combined with Earth's population."

What they _hadn't_ known - at the time, anyway - was the fact that they had been protected by GISD agents working in the shadows, who had killed any local criminals attempting to take advantage of the Kavanagh girls' naivety.

While Louise and Genevieve were making their way to the London arcology, Quinn Dexter was consolidating his control of New York's sect covens

Al Capone had come up with a new strategy, which would be implemented while he was waiting for his antimatter stocks to be replenished. Instead of all-out invasion, he would seed worlds with possessed. This had the added benefit - for him, anyway - of ridding the Organisation of those possessed who disagreed with his ideas of how to progress.

On Ombey, the Mortonridge Liberation was about to get underway, with hundreds of thousands of serjeants, Marines and combat-boosted mercenaries deploying all around the peninsular. The opening shots were electron-beam weapons fired at the red cloud over Mortonridge, de-focused in order to cover the maximum possible area, a move designed to exploit the possessed's vulnerability to electricity. It was a spectacular success, as possessed throughout the Confederation felt the effects. Incidentally, it also caused Dexter's first setback on Earth, and Govcentral was alerted to his presence. In a fit of paranoia, he'd fled to the Paris arcology.

As the possessed lost control of the cloud, and thunderstorms began to build up, the second phase of the opening assault commenced, as one a half million kinetic harpoons were fired, eliminating Mortonridge's communications network. However, because the possessed lost control of the cloud, all of the water they'd packed into that cloud now began falling as rain and storms. Over three thousand serjeants who were part of the amphibious assault were lost as their assault transports sank.

Despite that, the serjeants eventually landed, and began slogging their way towards the centre of the peninsular. Resistance from the possessed was non-existent, as they had pulled back from the coast. However, that didn't mean that there wasn't any resistance to the advance; the possessed had set up booby traps in the coastal towns, which slowed the advance on top of the mud.

In London, Louise and Genevieve took the time to marvel at the sight of the ancient city huddled under the armour-crystal Westminster dome - even the cluster of four 'original' domes erected at the end of the twenty-first century and were now items of historical interest - before deciding on a hotel to stay at. They'd decided on the Ritz.

"How'd you come to that decision?" Xander asked.

"Well, I wanted somewhere safe and comfortable," Louise answered. "So I... basically went by price," she added, slightly sheepishly.

Xander snickered briefly. "Why am I not surprised?" he asked the universe in general.

Louise glared at him briefly, before relenting and smiling herself. "I know, but I'd never even been off Kesteven Island before then, let alone off Norfolk," she said. "It seemed like the correct thing to do at the time."

Once they'd settled in and unpacked, Louise spent an hour wrestling with Earth's datanet, trying to find any references to Banneth, in order warn her about Quinn Dexter, and turned up lots of nothing. So she made a decision - she'd buy a set of neural nanonics. Gen immediately wanted a set as well, and only pointing out that she was too young for a set prevented a tantrum when she'd been forbidden a set of her own - which was why Gen was so happy when Joshua and Louise had bought her a set for her birthday.

But first came buying some clothes - both normal clothes and formalwear - a trip to a beautician, and a couple of toys for Gen. Oxford Street had certainly been an education, particularly the advertisements. Of course, Xander just _had_ to know, and when Louise haltingly described them, his eyes glazed over momentarily before he started laughing.

"I think it'd be safe to say that those sort of ads will still be around," he said. "Y'know, all of a sudden, I'm kind of keen to get to Earth."

Ione and Louise refused to dignify his comment with a response, Gen tried to look innocent - and failed dismally - and Joshua merely chuckled and shook his head.

"Okay, now that we've had that little side-trip to the gutter, courtesy of my imagination," Xander said. "We now return you to your regularly scheduled story." After another brief round of chuckles, the story continued...

Louise bought neural nanonics; being computer-illiterate, she went straight for the top-of-the-line equipment... and found out about the nanonic bugs that had been implanted in both her and Gen while they were in the Halo.

"Don't forget about Andy," Gen said, rolling her eyes.

"Andy?" Xander asked, while Louise blushed, Gen giggled and Joshua smirked.

"The sales assistant who sold me my neural nanonics and implanted them," Louise replied, still blushing. "He was very... attentive."

"Instant crush, I'm guessing," Xander said speculatively. The way Louise's blush deepened and Gen giggled proved him right. "I assume this was before you married Joshua?"

Louise nodded, but didn't say anything. Xander decided not to torment Louise any further. Apart from anything else, it was too easy. Instead, he asked Joshua, "So, what were you doing during all of this?"

"Well, Ione had just lumbered me with _another_ crucial, humanity-is-depending-on-it type mission; to wander through unexplored space, looking for something called the Sleeping God," Joshua said, and Ione jabbed him in the ribs with an elbow.

"The what?"

"Back on Lalonde at the start of the crisis, Kelly Tirrel had recorded a scene where the Tyrathca colonists were building an effigy of something they called the Sleeping God.

"You see, about fifteen thousand years ago, the original Tyrathca homeworld's star - Mastrit-PJ - was going to expand into a red giant. Not wanting to become extinct, the Tyrathca - or rather, the Mosdva, a species they essentially enslaved - hollowed out over a thousand asteroids to flee the system and start new colonies. One of these arkships was damaged entering an empty system, which turned out to be not so empty, after all.

"There _was_ something in that system, which moved the arkship over a hundred and fifty light-years to a system with an inhabitable planet. Awed by the power this object displayed, they dubbed it the Sleeping God," Joshua explained.

"Okay, I can understand that. But what did that have to do with the possessed?"

"Not a lot... until the Kiint became interested enough to visit Kelly and buy the fleks of her recordings. Anything that interested them to the extent that they would visit a starscraper apartment - which is something they normally never do - was considered important enough to investigate."

"And you were picked," Xander realised.

"Yep. In fact, there was just enough time to get the _Lady Mac_ repaired - _again_ - before we headed off to Hesperi-LN, with a side trip to an antimatter production station to load up the antimatter drive, with a voidhawk for company and a scientific team as passengers."

"Syrinx and _Oenone_, right," Ione recalled.

Seeing the question forming on Xander's face, Joshua pre-empted it by saying. "_Oenone_ was the voidhawk that intercepted me in the Puerto de Santa Maria system. And to answer your next question, yes, Syrinx was - and still is - the captain. In fact, voidhawks and their captains are linked for life, hell, a voidhawk captain _gestates_ for a year inside the voidhawk."

"Damn," Xander said.

"In fact, Syrinx had just as much experience with the possessed as I did," Joshua continued. "She was captured by the possessed on Atlantis and tortured so that the possessed could try to capture _Oenone_."

"Ouch," Xander winced, then thought for a moment. "Weren't you still one crew-member short?"

Joshua nodded. "I still needed someone to handle fusion," he replied. "Fortunately, an opportunity presented itself. I'd just shared a meal with Syrinx, and was having a couple of drinks with her, when..."

**_*Flashback*_**

They downed the remained of their Norfolk Tears. Syrinx blew heavily, and blinked the moisture away from her eyes. Then she frowned at the figure standing at the bar. "Jesus, Joshua. I didn't know there was two of you."

The enjoyable surprise of hearing an Edenist swear in such a fashion was quelled with pique when he saw who she was talking about. He stuck up his hand and waved Liol over.

"Delighted to meet you," Liol said when Joshua introduced them. He polished up the Calvert grin for her benefit and kissed her hand.

Syrinx laughed, and stood up. "Sorry, Liol, I'm afraid I had my inoculation some time ago." Joshua was chuckling.

"I'll leave the pair of you to it," she said, and gave Joshua a light kiss. "Don't be late."

"Got her edress?" Liol asked from the side of his mouth as he watched her walk away.

"Liol, that's a voidhawk ship-tunic. Syrinx doesn't have an eddress. So how are you?"

"Absolutely fine." Liol reversed a chair, and straddled it, arms resting on the back. "This is party city for me, all right. I think I'll move Quantum Serendipity here after the crisis."

"Right. Haven't seen much of you since we docked."

"Well, hey, no surprise there. That Dominique, hell of a girl." He lowered his voice to a throaty gloating growl. "Game on, five, six times a night. Every position I know, then some that's got to be just for xenocs."

"Wow."

"Last night, you know what? Threesome. Neomone joined in."

"No shit? You record a sensevise?"

Liol put both hands down on the table, and stared at his brother. "Josh."

"Yep."

"For Christ's sake, take me with you."

**_*End Flashback*_**

Once again Xander was reduced to helpless laughter. "Too much of a good thing, eh?" he wheezed.

"That's it, Xander," Ione said mock-threateningly. "I'm _definitely_ going to introduce you to Dominique now."

Xander gulped. "Errr..." he began, then his shoulders slumped. "I'm doomed, aren't I?" He stood up and declared in a loud voice, "We who are about to die, salute you!" before sitting back down while everyone else chuckled.

Back to the story once more... the Mortonridge Liberation was bogging down in the mud - at least it had stopped raining - and the situation wasn't helped when the possessed managed to pull off a successful ambush with mortars in the Catmos Vale, near the town of Ketton. The counter-strike involved using kinetic harpoons again, this time to create a ripple pattern in the boggy ground the destroy the fortifications at Ketton.

The fortifications were destroyed - along with most of the town - but the operation backfired when the possessed panicked and removed Ketton and the surrounding area from the universe.

"That's what I meant when I said that the only requirement was that there be enough possessed on a planet, Xander." Ione said.

"Gotcha. Obviously there weren't enough possessed to remove the whole planet, though, or even the entire peninsular," Xander said. "Otherwise, they would have."

"That's right."

In New York, GISD tactical teams launched an assault on the possessed in all of the domes in the arcology. There was little, if anything, in the way of tactical finesse, simply sheer brute fire-power. The operation was successful, but at a high cost - it was estimated that ten civilians were killed and another ninety wounded for _each_ possessed eliminated.

Quinn Dexter had moved on to Edmonton, leaving behind him cadres of possessed in Paris, Johannesburg and Bombay. Gathering followers, he began to put in motion his plans for vengeance against Banneth, starting with the messy slaughter of acolytes of the Light Bringer sects.

Louise found that even neural nanonics didn't make finding Banneth any easier. And to top it off, she'd gotten no response to any of the messages she'd sent to Joshua at Tranquillity - at the time, she didn't know that her messages were being blocked. Instead, she hired a private detective to try to track Banneth down.

_Oenone_ and the _Lady Mac_ had arrived at Hesperi-LN, and the scientific team boarded the arkship Tanjuntic-RI in search of any data on the Sleeping God's location. Despite interference from a hellhawk that had followed them from the antimatter production station - it had been Capone's production station - and the Tyrathca themselves, the mission had been semi-successful.

They managed to find the co-ordinates of the Sleeping God... but they were in the Tyrathcan system, which they couldn't translate, even with _Oenone_'s help. Not wishing to return to Hesperi-LN - their departure had been hairy enough, with _Oenone_ being forced to swallow inside the arkship to pick up the team, who were being pursued by Tyrathca soldiers.

So they decided to head to Mastrit-PJ, instead, with the hopes that something had survived long enough to be able to translate the co-ordinates into something that could be entered into the _Lady Mac_'s navigation computer, and be used by _Oenone_.

On Earth, Dexter had come to an alarming - for him - realisation. The sects which he had devoted his life to, and on whose behalf he had been sent to Lalonde as an Ivet... were being run by a branch of the government in order to keep the lowest levels of society under their control. Thoroughly alarmed, he'd made an effort to leave the Edmonton arcology, only to find that the vac-trains had been closed down.

In London, Louise had taken delivery of the search engine software from Andy - who'd lied to her when he said that it had had to be delivered - along with a near-desperate dinner invitation. She made his day when she agreed, and crushed his hopes when she brought Genevieve along. Strangely enough, it had been an enjoyable evening anyway, although threats of dire consequences unless Gen behaved herself probably helped.

After the dinner, she received at datavise from Robinson - the private detective she'd hired - which led to a meeting in the hotel lounge, where she was given a very watered-down version of both Dexter and Banneth's background. Reluctantly, Louise decided to travel to the Edmonton arcology, in order to deliver her warning in person, as her one attempt to datavise Banneth had been ignored. Despite Robinson's protests, she took Gen along as well.

While they were on the vac-train, she received a news update. Dexter had assembled all of the possessed in Edmonton, and hurled them at the Light Bringer sect headquarters. The Edmonton Police reacted rapidly, surrounding the area with heavily-armed AT squads.

But Dexter had been expecting that. In fact, that was what he _wanted_ to happen. He badly needed to get out of Edmonton, but the vac-train routes would only be re-opened if Govcentral officials - not to mention the 'supercops' running the sects - thought that the possessed in the arcology had been eliminated.

In short, it was a massive diversion.

By the time Louise, Gen and Robinson arrived at Edmonton, the battle was over, with the possessed being wiped out, and the Light Bringer cultists suffering heavy losses. To her surprise, they were met by an AT Major, and escorted straight to Banneth. After delivering her warning, Robinson suggested that Banneth accompany them back to London. Shrugging indifferently, she agreed.

Once back in London, Banneth wandered off, to be met by representatives from the local Light Bringer coven, while Louise and Gen returned to the hotel, where Louise tried to get approval to travel to Tranquillity, which was refused.

Meanwhile, Capone had pulled off a brilliant strike against the Confederation Navy headquarters. He'd blackmailed a naval officer into having some antimatter implanted in his abdomen with threats against his family. The officer then made his way to the Avon system, where the plan was to do to Avon what Dexter had done to Nyvan.

However, the antimatter was detonated outside Trafalgar, which meant that it stayed in orbit, but the damage was still catastrophic. The surface of the half of the asteroid facing the blast was reduced to molten rock, destroying everything attached to it; counter-rotating spaceport, thermal-dump mechanisms... _everything_. The heat seepage from the molten rock would also render the asteroid uninhabitable, at least without functional thermal-exchange equipment, which couldn't be attached until the rock had cooled down, which wouldn't happen before the asteroid was rendered uninhabitable.

That wasn't the extent of the damage, though. Over two hundred and fifty Adamist warships were destroyed or damaged beyond repair, and fifty-two voidhawks were killed. Ten thousand people were also killed or badly injured.

All this meant that the Confederation Navy headquarters was forced to relocate to Avon. Enraged by this, the Confederation Assembly decided to eliminate the Organisation fleet, along with the Strategic Defence networks of both New California and Arnstadt, accepting that both planets would be removed from the universe in return for eliminating Capone as a threat. By this time, Capone had abandoned Kursk as not being worth the effort to keep.

In London, Dexter was looking for a source of bodies to open to possession. The sects were out, for obvious reasons, but he found a new supply without too much difficulty.

Older wealthy people had set up a zero-tau mausoleum, where they would wait until the possession crisis had been resolved, in an attempt to avoid the beyond. Acting with the cunning that rats and weasels are famous for, he simply marched in and snatched all four hundred of the zero-tau refugees.

He also grabbed a couple of more people - someone who was about the same height and build as him, and another victim, for other reasons. By a stroke of good fortune, the second victim had also been a qualified nurse, which made what Dexter was doing easier.

Needing to throw the 'supercops' - B7 - off his trail, he had the first victim's facial features modified to resemble Dexter's own, and dragged him through the ghost realm to where Banneth was holed up. The victim was then produced, and Dexter lingered in the ghost realm to see what would happen next. In a staggering display of overkill, a SD X-ray laser was fired into the dome, killing Banneth, Dexter's double, and virtually everyone else in the building. Naturally, Dexter escaped unscathed, and slightly impressed at the lengths that would be gone to to get rid of him.

The strike against Arnstadt's SD network went off without a hitch. Deploying grossly overwhelming fire-power - five hundred voidhawks and eight hundred Adamist warships - the Confederation strike force simply fired their combat wasp salvoes before jumping clear. The hellhawks and Organisation ships didn't even bother to try to stop the onrushing horde of missiles, choosing to flee. Voidhawks followed the fleeing Organisation ships, which meant that very few survived to return to New California.

With Arnstadt's SD network - and virtually everything else in orbit - gone, the planet was taken from the universe. The strike force then went on to New California, intending to repeat the process, but Capone managed to broker a deal. He would turn over New California's SD network and all of his remaining ships, and in return the Navy would allow him to evacuate his followers to the planet, and they would remove in from the universe. Of course, the evacuation process would take some time - about a week.

"So New California was taken from the universe as well?" Xander asked.

"Nope," Joshua replied. "The crisis was resolved before then. But you're going to have to wait to find out how."

"Damn."

_Oenone_ and the _Lady Mac_ were approaching Mastrit-PJ. Expecting to find an uninhabited system - but with remnants of a civilisation that could be searched for Tyrathca starcharts and co-ordinate system - they were surprised to find that the system _was_ inhabited, the locals living on immense structures - diskcities - orbiting the red supergiant's equator.

"So, who was living there?" Xander asked.

"At first, we thought it was the Tyrathca. After all, the system _was_ the Tyrathca home system, and the messages we received _were_ in the Tyrathca language, so we could be forgiven for drawing that conclusion. So, imagine our surprise when we met not Tyrathca, but Mosdva, instead."

"You mean the enslaved species that built the arkships for the Tyrathca?"

"That's them. Apparently, since there was no way that all of the Tyrathca could be evacuated in arkships, the Mosdva were also set to work building asteroid settlements for the Tyrathca. They were also the ones who would decide where the inhabited asteroids would be placed."

"So, they were the brains of the outfit."

"Pretty much, yeah. With hindsight, I'm amazed that no-one suspected that something like that had happened. After all, the Tyrathca breeders are the only fully sentient members of their species, and for as long as we'd been in contact with them, they'd made no major innovations. In fact, they were still using kit that was pretty much the same as they'd been using for the last fifteen thousand years."

"Why?"

"Because it worked. They took the saying 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' to the extreme."

"Sheesh. So what did the Mosdva look like?"

"Think man-sized sea-horses, and you'd be pretty close."

"Gotcha." And Xander _did_ have a pretty good idea of what Joshua had meant. "So, what happened next?"

"We started negotiating to exchange information; after all, some of the technology being used by the Mosdva was pretty impressive. And we exchanged histories, as well. Apparently, there had been _another_ species which had lived there before the Tyrathca and the Mosdva - the Ridbat, who had enslaved the Mosdva, before wiping themselves out with thermonuclear weapons, along with most of the other life on the planet.

"The Mosdva managed to survive, and developed technology that was based on sustainability - after all, the Ridbat didn't leave much behind for them to use - and started a civilisation. It was about this time that the Tyrathca developed sentience. The important thing to remember here is that the Tyrathca are a caste-based herd species, and one of the castes they evolved was a warrior caste. So, the Mosdva were placed under heavy pressure, and were in danger of becoming extinct, when they discovered that Mastrit-PJ was about to expand into a red giant.

"So the Tyrathca enslaved the Mosdva, and set them to work to find a way for the Tyrathca to survive, which ended up with the arkship concept. Since there would never be enough arkships to carry _all_ of the Tyrathca, the Mosdva were also set to work building asteroid habitats for the Tyrathca. The only reason the Mosdva were kept around afterwards was that they would be needed to maintain the asteroid settlements' technical systems, and to build more as needed.

"After the expansion was complete, the Tyrathca became more and more dependant on the Mosdva technical ability, which gave the Mosdva a window of opportunity, which they seized; over a period of a thousand years, they took over control, sealing the Tyrathca into their asteroids, while they built the diskcities to live on."

"That's pretty impressive," Xander admitted, trying to maintain his mental equilibrium after seeing the mental image that conjured.

"That's what we thought at the time. But that didn't alter the fact that we needed the _Tyrathca_ stellar co-ordinate system. We assumed that the Mosdva would use a similar system, or at least know about it, which made sense, given their shared history," Joshua continued.

"How'd you go about it?"

"We didn't want to seem to keen to get it," Joshua explained. "After all, the Mosdva are as smart as us, and would have figured out that something was amiss if we'd offered the ZTT drive schematics in return for a ten thousand year old almanac. So we had to build up to it gradually..."

Unfortunately, it had not gone that smoothly. The Mosdva negotiator - Quantook-LOU - had seen through Joshua's approach and demanded to know precisely why he had made the long voyage, and why he was negotiating with the Mosdva when he had expected to meet the Tyrathca.

"So, I went with the story that we were trying to find out how far Tyrathca-controlled space extended, and casually dropped the ZTT drive into the pot. Quantook-LOU's reaction was first amazement, saying that we'd offered his species salvation. Trouble was, in the very next breath he offered to launch a crusade to wipe out the Tyrathca - using the technology we'd offered him - in revenge for enslaving them. _Not_ what we had in mind."

"What did you do next?" Xander asked eagerly.

"Well, there was some debate as to whether or not we should still turn over the ZTT drive. Liol came up with a good suggestion, though, when he said, 'It's not that stressful. We can give Quantook-LOU any old file full of shit. Hand over the schematic for a deluxe, ten-flavour ice-cream making machine if you want. He's not going to know the difference until we're long gone.'," Joshua replied with a grin.

"That's just beautiful," Xander chuckled.

"I didn't do that, though, tempting as it was. I just insisted on the map of Tyrathca space, along with the stellar co-ordinate system they used, or I'd go somewhere else. Eventually, Quantook-LOU gave in and admitted that, although his dominion didn't have the data, he knew where it would be stored."

"Where?"

"One of the Tyrathca enclaves. Because the situation on the diskcity was starting to head south - in fact, a war was about to break out - we had to fly Quantook-LOU to the enclave in the _Lady Mac_. Once we arrived, two of the serjeants we'd brought along - with Ione's personality in charge - went with him to ensure no funny business.

"After a brief stand-off, we eventually managed to get the information we wanted, but the situation was not helped when other Mosdva dominions started to attack the Tyrathca enclave. _Oenone_ managed to prevent any invasion by cutting the transport links, and then cut the enclave loose, before using the antimatter drive to push it free while the negotiations were concluded.

"But, of course, a complication showed up in the form of two of Capone's hellhawks. A brief but nasty skirmish broke out, which ended in a draw with _Oenone_ maintaining a stand-off. I offered to help Syrinx break the stand-off, but she declined, saying that it would take too long and that we should go straight to the Sleeping God."

"Did you?"

"Yep, but before I tell you what happened there, I need to wrap up the rest of the story."

"You mean we're getting to the end?"

"Yeah."

On Ketton Island, in another dimension, things were becoming pretty grim. Food, which had been in short supply to start with was approaching critical levels. To make matters worse, the air was steadily becoming more and more polluted with carbon dioxide, as there were no plants to recycle it. The possessed had started to disperse, abandoning their leaders and joining the serjeants who had been caught up in the area transported to the other dimension.

Then they made an incredible discovery.

The dimension was inhabited.

The beings weren't native to the dimension, though; they were an incredibly ancient race, who had transferred their consciousness to crystal structures - akin to an Edenist Consensus. They, too, had faced their own possession crisis, like the Laymil and the Kiint, but they also insisted that an overall solution to the crisis must come from humanity itself. However, they were willing to provide assistance for the possessed on Ketton Island.

The options they presented were these; they could remove the possessing souls and allow them to disperse, resulting in permanent death, or the possessing souls could join them in their quest for knowledge. These options didn't appeal to the possessed, but most of the serjeants were willing to join the crystal entities. This opened up a third option; which was that the possessing souls could take over a serjeant body, and enough serjeants joined the crystal entities to allow every possessing soul to have a body of their own.

The crystal entities then opened portals back to Mortonridge, allowing the serjeants and the possessing-souls-in-serjeant-bodies to return to their own universe. There was a brief moment of confusion, but eventually things were sorted out.

There were still pockets of possessed under siege on the peninsular, but the Mortonridge Liberation was effectively over.

On Earth, Quinn Dexter had put his plans to take over the London arcology into action. He sent the possessed from the zero-tau mausoleum to create more possessed, with a goal of fifteen thousand by the next morning. Once that goal had been achieved, those possessed would then fan out across the arcology, knowing that the police simply didn't have the resources to deal with all of them, and gambling that Govcentral wouldn't fire SD weapons into the arcology.

Then something happened to alert B7 of Dexter's survival. While on patrol, two police officers nearly had heart attacks when a body was dropped in front of their patrol car. The body showed signs of having been killed by white fire, and was one of the possessed from the zero-tau mausoleum. Shocked into action, B7 ordered the inspection of the other zero-tau pods in the building... and they were _all_ empty. Since some of the people in those zero-tau pods had arrived after the supposed death of Dexter, that proved to B7 - the Western European supervisor in particular - that he was still alive and at large.

It was time to play the last trump.

The arcology was now under curfew, so it was a surprise when Robinson arrived, along with an invitation to meet 'someone in authority'. Agreeing, Louise and Gen packed their belongings, and were taken to a large garage, where they switched to a large vehicle suitable for travel outside the arcologies in Earth's then-turbulent environment.

The state of the ecosystem had come as a shock to the sisters - there were no trees, just a dense green grass that was everywhere. This was tapegrass, a cross between grass and moss, designed to prevent soil erosion.

After a four-hour trip, they reached their destination, a geodesic crystal dome that was a smaller version of the domes that Earth's arcologies sheltered under. Inside was a scene taken straight from pre-armada storm days, with parklands and small woods. They were taken to a manor house that make Cricklade seem gaudy and pretentious, where they were met by a young man who introduced himself as Charles Montgomery David Filton-Asquith, Western European supervisor for B7.

It turned out that he'd been alive since the early twenty-second century, having used affinity to transfer from one cloned body to another. At the start, he and his colleagues had been corporate magnates on a scale previously unheard of. As Earth's environment started to break down, governments started selling off services to acquire more resources to try to combat the destabilising environment. Charlie and the others had taken advantage of this to garner unimaginable wealth - which they ended up needing, since they were the ones who actually paid for Earth's security forces - and eventually consolidated all of Earth's national governments into Govcentral.

Another point of interest was that they'd also been indirectly responsible for Edenism. Intending to keep bitek for themselves, they began to turn public opinion against bitek, starting with religious condemnation. On the verge of success, their plans had been derailed when Wing-Tsit Chong transferred his personality into Eden's neural structure. Religious leaders, their hands forced, issued their declarations too early; there was still too much bitek in general use on Earth, who emigrated to Eden, which had achieved independence. and thus Edenism was born.

It was it this point that Charlie confessed to manipulating them, much to Louise's dismay, and revealed that bring them there was his last gambit to lure Quinn Dexter into a confrontation. Despite her frustration - mainly self-directed - she found herself enjoying the comfort of the dome's facilities, even if the attitudes of the other people living there were quite daunting at first.

The next morning, reality returned with a thud.

Charlie and the rest of B7 were preparing to abandon Earth, as the possessed were starting to gain the upper hand, particularly in New York, with Govcentral considering firing SD weapons in a circle around the arcology's perimeter, in the hopes that New York's possessed would remove only that arcology from the universe. If that didn't work, the options were limited to go along for the ride when Earth was removed from this universe, or the SD weapons would be fired into the arcology, destroying it.

At that, Xander's face went pale. "Destroy an entire arcology?" he asked in a near whisper. "How many people live in one?"

"In New York? About three hundred million," Joshua replied.

"And Govcentral was willing to sacrifice that many of its citizens?"

"It was the same sort of logic that saw the Confederation willing to sacrifice New California and Arnstadt to eliminate the threat posed by Capone," Joshua pointed out.

"Still, I can't believe that Govcentral was willing to slaughter millions of its own citizens," Xander repeated.

"And that's without taking the situation in London into consideration," Louise added. "It was then that Charlie told me that SD weapons might have to be used on the arcology to stop Dexter."

"Jesus," Xander muttered, looking vaguely queasy.

"But there was still one last chance. Apparently, the Confederation Navy had developed what they called an anti-memory weapon, which destroyed a person's soul by wiping out their memories. Charlie intended to find a way to use it on Dexter."

And there was a way. When Louise bemoaned the fact that Fletcher Christian was unavailable to perform that task, Charlie surprised her by saying that he was. Apparently, instead of being put straight into zero-tau, he was still in the Halo, helping GISD scientists try to understand the physics of possession.

Louise agreed to ask Fletcher for his help, on one condition - that Gen was taken to Tranquillity. Gen was furious, but eventually she agreed. With Gen safely on her way to Tranquillity, Louise and Robinson returned to London, where they met up with Fletcher - who was accompanied by a trio of GISD agents from the Halo - before starting to track Dexter down.

Unfortunately, he found them first.

Making their way through buildings, the group encountered the possessed. After a brief chase and a nasty fight, Fletcher had been captured, the GISD agents had been killed, and Robinson had given his life to cover Louise's escape.

Louise had fled, heading for the one safe place knew knew of - Andy's flat. She ended up spending the night there, but she didn't go into details, despite Xander's prying.

"Fine, don't tell me, then," he grumped.

It was then that the red cloud began to form under the centre of the Westminster Dome. Getting in touch with Charlie, she warned him that this cloud was different to the one that had formed over Norfolk and the other worlds the possessed had gotten a foothold on.

Charlie had more bad news for her; the Govcentral Senate had granted the President authority to use the SD weapons against the arcologies to eliminate the possessed, despite the billions of casualties that would be the inevitable result. Appalled, Louise had determined to make one last appeal to Dexter's humanity. Andy had been too frightened to leave the flat, and so Louise had gone by herself.

Xander looked at her, his expression a mix of appalled and amazed. "Jesus, and I thought some of the things I did were crazy enough."

"I didn't have much of a choice at the time, Xander," Louise protested. "Which is something you can agree with, surely."

"Yeah, but still..." Xander's voice trailed off as the comparison to when he'd dragged Angel along to the Master's lair rose in his mind. "Fair enough, I guess."

"Even Charlie tried to talk me out of it, so you needn't feel too bad about it, Xander," Louise said with a slight grin.

"So, what happened, then?"

Louise's anger hadn't lasted very long, but the determination to face Dexter had remained. In fact, it hadn't been too long before she encountered a group of possessed, who had taken her to Saint Paul's Cathedral, which he was using as a base of operations. It was there she was reunited with Fletcher, who'd been tormented and tortured throughout the night.

She delivered her warning, but Dexter had reacted poorly, knocking her off her feet and threatening her quite graphically. This time Xander didn't ask for details, as the expression on Louise's face gave him an idea of what sort of threats he'd made.

Dexter then began exerting his energistic strength, along with that of the other possessed within the cathedral, prying at the very fabric of reality itself, weakening it.

Before too long, he'd prised a hole in the universe, and the first of an invading army of monsters from another dimension had started to emerge. His followers fled screaming, and Louise was beaten, waiting for the true torment to begin, when...

"I hate to interrupt," Joshua cut in, "but I think I'd better say what happened at the Sleeping God at this point."

"Why do I get the feeling that this is where everything gets wrapped up?" Xander asked.

"Because you know how a story should go?" Joshua replied with a grin.

"Probably something like that," Xander agreed. "Get on with it, smart-ass."

The trip from Mastrit-PJ to the system where the Sleeping God was located had been made quickly, due to an indefinable sense of urgency that was filling Joshua. When they arrived, and scanned the system, the science team found that there was only one object orbiting the star. No other planets, no asteroid belts, no cometary halo... _nothing_. Not even the normal dust that was found in most star systems.

Jumping to a distance of a million kilometres out, a closer scan revealed the first anomaly - the object had no darkside, as light from the star was being bent around it by its mass to illuminate the whole object evenly.

The next fact to jump out at them was the fact that the object was a naked singularity - the point at which all the physical laws of the universe break down. And it was stable - and had been for at least the last fifteen thousand years. This was not just anomalous; it was impossible. But there it was.

The singularity was also emitting a torrent of gravitational wave vacuum fluctuations - tiny ripples in the fabric of the universe - which led to the next anomaly/impossibility; the fact that they were regulated and manipulated to form patterns. Equally impossible, but equally real.

Some near-frantic discussion among the science team came up with the theory that that was how the Tyrathca arkship had been moved a hundred and fifty light-years in an instant, as the vacuum fluctuations had a similar energy state to a voidhawk's distortion field. In effect, it had opened a wormhole for the Tyrathca.

"We were wondering how to get in touch with whatever was controlling it," Joshua said. "So I was pretty damned surprised when the singularity _itself_ datavised me, with a simple message: 'You ask'."

Xander stared at Joshua in shock. By itself, it was just another amazing event in an equally amazing story. But when piled on top of everything else he'd been told...

"I managed to contain my shock, though," Joshua continued, which caused Xander to snap back to the story, "and I asked it if it knew of any solutions to the possession crisis. As it turns out, it did, but we had to decide for ourselves..."

One of the Intelligence operative who'd accompanied the expedition asked the Sleeping God why it was helping, to which the reply had been that that was what it had been created to do, by a race that used its abilities to move themselves to another dimension.

"The crystal entities on Ketton Island?" Xander asked, still somewhat awed and bemused.

"Not that particular device, but one similar to it," Joshua replied.

"You mean there's more than one of them?"

"Yeah, but there's only one per _group_ of galaxies. In fact, we were pretty lucky that there was one so close to the Confederation, as it turned out."

"So, why did it help?"

"A simple answer would be because it could. In fact, that was pretty much the answer it gave us as well," Joshua replied. "However," he added, "it also raised the point of taking responsibility for deciding to intervene. Considering the level of our intervention at Mastrit-PJ, it made an impression on us."

"Does that mean that it didn't help everyone all the time?"

"That's right. It could have, but then that would mean that it would, in effect, be everyone's ruler, and it had had a restriction placed on it to prevent that from happening. With that out of the way, we were poised to ask for the list of solutions, but there was a hitch - we couldn't decide how to decide _which_ solution to use."

"Bloody hell," Xander muttered, something he'd done a lot during the course of the story. "The future of the human race hanging in the balance, and the people picked to save it unable to decide how. Why does that _not_ surprise me?"

"Well, it was eventually sorted out, obviously, since we're still here," Joshua pointed out. "Although it _did_ come as a bit of a shock - I was picked to make the decision."

"Yeah, that would be a bit of a surprise."

"Not to mention quite humbling..."

**_*Flashback*_**

He datavised the singularity: {Is that acceptable to you?}

{I cannot take responsibility for your decisions, collective or otherwise. My only constraints are that I will not permit you to use my abilities as a weapon. Other than that, you have free access.}

{OK. Show me what happened.}

**_*End Flashback*_**

"Of course, I should have realised that my statement was just a _tad_ too general," Joshua continued. "A fact that was driven home when the Sleeping God dumped the _whole story_ of _everything_ that had happened, from Lalonde to London, straight into my head."

Xander tried to imagine what that would feel like, but failed dismally. "So that's how you knew what was going on in places you hadn't been," he realised.

"Something like that, yes," Joshua agreed. "It even showed me the beyond, and told me how to get past it."

"How?"

"Well, it has no distance, only time. That's the direction you must travel in."

"What does that mean?"

"Well, the universe will end one day, what the Sleeping God called the omega point. What happens after that will depend on what the souls of everything that has ever lived and what they bring to that point."

"Okay, I can go with that," Xander said slowly, and to his surprise, he _could_. "So, if the beyond is so simple to get through, then why did all those souls stay there?"

"Because they were afraid, basically. Afraid to head off into the unknown, preferring to suffer endless torment rather than risk leaving everything they had ever known and which was still so close to them."

"Yeah, but sill, surely people would be curious enough to go see what lies ahead of them," Xander protested.

Joshua shook his head. "Afraid not, Xander," he responded. "As pointed out by the fact that the possession crisis happened in the first place. Quite a few people lack the sufficient faith in themselves to explore the unknown, and even those who _do_ have enough self-belief suffer moments of doubt and uncertainty. I know I do."

Xander couldn't help but agree with what Joshua had said. "What happened next?"

"The last thing the Sleeping God showed me was what was happening at Saint Paul's at that moment. Seeing what was happening to Louise, I started the Sleeping God, and... well, basically I teleported to her side," Joshua admitted.

"Teleported?" Xander blurted. He'd heard some pretty unbelievable things during the story but this was the limit.

"Well, maybe not so much teleported as had a one-man wormhole opened for me to London. But the net effect was the same," Joshua replied, with a certainty that meant that he was either telling the truth or a perfect liar. 

Somewhat reluctantly, Xander believed him. "What do you mean, started the Sleeping God?" he asked, in lieu of pursuing that line of inquiry.

"Put into motion the solution I'd chosen," Joshua replied. "The first step was opening a wormhole big enough to cover the entire Sol system - about twelve billion kilometres across - and shifted it to its new home. I even managed to leave Quinn Dexter behind, as well as getting rid of all the possessing souls."

"How'd you manage that? And where is Earth's new home?"

"I was able to arrange the internal structure of the wormhole so that the possessing souls couldn't stay in their host bodies," Joshua explained. "Quinn Dexter, I wanted to stay behind. And it wasn't just Earth I moved; it was the entire Confederation, along with the planets that the possessed had removed from this universe.

"The new home for the Confederation is outside the Milky Way galaxy, twenty thousand light-years out from the core, and ten thousand above the plane of the ecliptic. The view is spectacular," Joshua added with a grin. "Hell, I was even able to repair Earth's environment."

It was at this point that Xander just decided to accept everything he was told. "But surely it'd be wrecked again before too long."

"No, not really, since I also moved the forty-six stage-one colony worlds to share Earth's orbit. That means that Earth's population can be dispersed among them - about three-quarters of a billion each - and have a comfortable standard of living without causing too much damage."

"Okay, that sounds reasonable," Xander said. "So, what happened to Quinn Dexter?"

"Well, he was floating through space, when I made him an offer: take all the lost souls to the end of the universe. Of course, since I told him the wormhole that the Sleeping God created was to the time of God's Brother, he couldn't agree fast enough. Pity that he was possessed not by only one soul, but by one hundred billion," Joshua said with a grin.

"That's just too damn bad," Xander responded with a chuckle. "Serves him right for not reading the fine print."

"When Joshua appeared beside me, I was astonished," Louise said, picking up the story. "I was amazed and overjoyed to see him, so I hugged him and refused to let go. That's when I found out that Joshua had got rid of the possessed, except for Fletcher, so that he could thank him for looking after me throughout the crisis. And I got a chance to say good-bye to him properly."

Xander watched the emotions play across Louise's face. "From what you've told me about him, Fletcher seemed like a nice enough guy. I'm starting to wish that I got the chance to meet him."

Louise brightened at that. "I think you would have gotten along well with him, Xander," she said. "It's a shame that we'll never get the chance to find out, though."

"After Fletcher left," Joshua said. "I took Louise to Tranquillity."

"The way we arrived there was quite surprising," Louise said with a smile.

"Lemme guess - you teleported?" Xander asked.

"Got it in one," Joshua replied. "It seemed like the thing to do," he added with a grin.

"Once they arrived," Ione put in, "I gave Louise a chance to freshen up, and that's when I found out that Joshua was now affinity-capable."

"It seemed like the thing to do," Joshua defended himself. "And besides, I had to pass on the new co-ordinates to the Jovian Consensus _somehow_."

"It wasn't a criticism, Joshua. In fact, I'm still amazed that you showed such restraint in letting go of the Sleeping God's power when you did."

Joshua shrugged. "Eh. The responsibility that would have come with it didn't really appeal to me. But I have to laugh at what Liol said to me when the _Lady Mac_ docked at Tranquillity. 'Fine bloody captain you make! You abandon us there to have fun all by yourself, and the next thing we know we've got Jupiter's SD Command screaming at us.'

"Of course, the only possible reply was, 'I brought you back, what more do you want?'"

Xander couldn't help but laugh at that. "What else did you do?"

"Well, I shifted all the inhabited Dorado asteroids to the New Washington system, and to the habitats from that system to Jupiter and put the Mosdva there in their place. It seemed like the thing to do."

"A nice reward for the almanac information," Xander agreed. "So, that's it, crisis over?"

"Crisis over, yes, but not the story. A couple of loose ends yet. First, there had to be a party. You can't do something like that without throwing a massive party."

"It was fun," Gen recalled. "The best bit was watching Liol try to avoid Dominique for the entire party," she added with a giggle.

Xander added this little titbit to everything else he'd been told about Dominique. "Oh, man... I just hope she doesn't do anything like that to me," he muttered before sighing. "I suppose it'd be pointless to resist, then?"

"You bet," Joshua said with an evil smirk. "The only bit of advice I can offer is to go with the flow. Trust me, it'll be safer that way."

"That doesn't make me feel a whole lot better."

"That was when I left the party with Louise... and proposed to her. On bent knee and everything."

"How'd she take it?"

"Well..."

**_*Flashback*_**

He dropped down on one knee, and held her hand. "Marry me."

From the expression on her face she could have been in agony. "That's very kind, Joshua, and if you'd asked that day you left Cricklade I'd even have eloped with you. But, really, you don't know anything about me. It wouldn't work; you're a starship captain, and unutterably famous, I'm a landowner's daughter. All we ever were was a beautiful dream I had once."

"I know everything there is to know about you - thanks to the singularity I've lived every second of your life. And don't you ever call yourself someone's daughter again. You're Louise Kavanagh, nothing else. I had one exciting flight, which was the result of thousands of people backing me up behind the scenes. You walked right up to Quinn Dexter and tried to stop him. It is not possible to possess more courage than that, Louise. You were astonishing. Those drunken buffoons in Harkey's bar look up at me. I stand in awe of what you did."

"You saw everything I did?" she enquired.

"Yes," he said firmly. "Including last night."

"Oh."

He gently pulled at her hand, making her kneel beside him. "I don't think I could marry a saint, Louise. And you already know I've never been one."

"Do you really want to marry me?"

"Yes."

"But we'd never be together."

"Starship captains are a thing of the past now, just like landowner daughters. There's so much we have to do in our lives."

"You don't mind living on Norfolk?"

"We'll change it together, Louise. You and I."

She kissed him, then smiled demurely. "Do we have to go back to the party?" she murmured.

"No."

Her smile widened, and she stood up. Joshua stayed on one knee. "I haven't had my answer yet. And this classic routine is killing my leg muscle."

"I was taught to always keep a man waiting," she said imperiously. "But your answer is yes."

**_*End Flashback*_**

Ione and Gen were smiling after Joshua finished telling of how he proposed to Louise. Xander couldn't help being impressed, and said so.

"After that, I used the Sleeping God's teleport ability one last time to visit the Kiint homeworld, and to pick up Jay. Oh, and to get the Kiint to stop spying on us, and the medical help they agreed to provide once the crisis was over."

"Huh? The Kiint were spying on the Confederation?"

"Not so much spying as observing," Joshua replied. "More like collecting information for historical archives, perhaps. But they agreed to stop, anyway."

"And the medical help?"

"Was sent straight away. The Kiint even helped reconstruction efforts, which was good of them."

"And that's the end of the story?"

"Pretty much," Joshua admitted.

"So, what did Jay get up to in the Kiint home system?"

"You'll have to wait until tomorrow to find that out," Joshua replied. "At least you'll be able to hear Jay tell her story herself."

"Hang on," Ione interrupted. "Why tomorrow?"

"I was hoping to keep this a surprise, but... tomorrow's Haile's birthday, and guess what?" Joshua replied.

Ione thought about it for a moment, before it dawned on her. "You don't mean..."

"Yep."

"What?" Xander asked curious.

"It would seem that Haile's coming to celebrate her birthday here," Ione replied. "Haile's the young Kiint we were talking about earlier."

"Oh," was all Xander could say, before rallying. "I don't know how you guys could be impressed with anything I ever did," he continued. "Most of the time I was Support Guy for someone who did most of the work. Louise, you tried to stand up to a total psychopath on your own, and Joshua, you saved the human species. Sure, you had a lot of help, but it was you who made the decision in the end."

Both Louise and Joshua shrugged, almost in unison. "That's as may be," Joshua said. "But you've got a 'saved to world' to your credit as well, plus at least one assist. That's pretty damned impressive, and you should never doubt that. In fact, when you get home, give Buffy a swift kick in the arse for me for not recognising properly what you've done to help her."

"Me, too," Louise added, closely followed by Ione and Gen's, "And me."

"Don't you mean _if_ I get home?"

"No, _when_," Joshua replied. "And I've got a pretty good idea about how to make it happen, too. Gen, can you do me a favour, and show Xander to his room? We won't be too far behind you."

"Sure, Joshua," Gen replied. "C'mon, this way," she added to Xander as the two of them left.

Once they had, Ione turned to Joshua and said, "I think I know how you're going to get Xander home - the Sleeping God."

"Sure," Joshua said. "After all, it allowed me to open a wormhole to the end of the universe, which is a few billion years in the future. Sending someone back a few centuries shouldn't be too much of a problem for it."

********

Gen led Xander to the door to his room. "Here it is, and your stuff is already taken care of," she said.

"Thanks, Da- Gen," he said, correcting himself.

Gen caught the slip. "What were you about to say?" she asked.

"You remind me a lot of someone back home," Xander replied. "Buffy's younger sister, as a matter of fact."

"Oh. Well, when you get back, don't forget what we said, alright? I think you're a hero like my sister and brother-in-law," Gen replied, before hugging Xander tightly.

Caught by surprise, all Xander could do was return the hug. "'Night, Gen."

"Night, Xander."


	8. Meanwhile, Back In Sunnydale

**_Title: In Their Shadow - Interlude_**

**_Author: Robert Cox (smeghead_76@dodo.com.au)_**

**_Disclaimer: Buffy is owned by Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy productions. The Night's Dawn trilogy is owned by Peter F. Hamilton. At least until the copyright runs out, anyway. Since that won't happen for a long time at the least, I've just gotta hope that no-one takes offence._**

**_Summary: Xander has been transported to the 27th century. Can he adapt to life in the future? Can he ever return home? And, more to the point, can the guy stay out of trouble for once?_**

**_Rating: M-15+ (Australian system)_**

**_AN: Thanks to Grossclout, who volunteered for beta-ing duties in the later parts._**

**_AN2: There are a couple of non-standard methods of communication used in this story, represented as follows:_ Affinity _ and _**{Datavises}

**_AN3: In this AU, Buffy's found out about Xaner lying to her about Willow casting the Soul Curse on Angelus/Angel. When did this happen? You'll have to wait and see... *evil smirk*_**

* * *

**_Interlude: Meanwhile, Back In Sunnydale (That's *Sunnydale*, *not* the Sunnydale Dome of the Los Angeles Arcology)_**

**_Giles' Apartment, Sunnydale  
Three days after Xander's disappearance_**

Buffy was doing some half-hearted training, and Giles and Willow were brushing up on their knowledge of Giles' research books, when Faith and Dawn burst in through the front door.

"Giles! Xander's gone missing!" Dawn exclaimed.

"What?" Giles blurted, a worried expression on his face.

"We haven't seen him for a couple of days," Faith explained, "and he's usually pretty good about meeting us at the Bronze. So we went over to his apartment to see if there was anything wrong with him."

"We knocked at the door, but he didn't answer," Dawn continued. "So I tried the handle, and it was unlocked, so we went in. The place was a disaster zone... even more than usual. We took a quick look, and all his stuff was there, but there was a critical absence of Xander."

"Maybe he's left town for a brief period," Giles suggested, more in hope than any real expectation that that was what happened.

Faith shook her head. "He wouldn't leave me... us... like that. Not without telling us first. And besides, his car was still in the parking area."

Willow wondered about the 'me' in that last statement, but let it slide, mainly because she was starting to worry as well. It was at this time that Buffy, attracted by the commotion, entered the room. "What's all the fuss?" she asked.

When Faith and Dawn repeated what they'd told Giles and Willow, Buffy said, "Are you sure he's gone missing? Maybe he's just run off..." she never completed the sentence, not having seen the fist propelled by a very angry Faith, but she certainly _felt_ it.

"WHAT THE FUCK IS YOUR DAMAGE?" Faith screamed at her sister Slayer, her earlier resolve not to pick a fight vanishing in a flood of fury mixed with not a little worry for the only Scooby apart from Dawn who had shown any real concern for her. "Xander would _never_ abandon us like that, even with all the shit you've given him over the last couple of years. And didn't you pay attention? All of his stuff is still in his apartment. His car is still here. He hasn't been seen for a couple of days. Add all that up, and throw in the fact that this is the Hellmouth, and what do you get?"

Buffy was still too groggy to reply, but Willow was the first to see the implications. "You mean he's been..." she started to say, but was unable to complete the sentence as tears began to build up in her eyes. She may have wanted Xander to stay out of the actual Slayage, but she was more than willing to let him participate in the group activities. Her only motivation was ensuring that her oldest friend wasn't hurt... or worse.

"I dunno, Willow," Dawn said, fighting back tears herself. "But I hope not."

By this time, Buffy had recovered the ability to speak. "You hit me," she said, looking at Faith in amazement. "I can't believe you did that."

"Believe it, Blondie," Faith snarled. "Fer feck's sake, has all the hair dye you use seeped through yer skull and fried yer brains? Xander - you know, the guy who's saved yer life on more than one occasion - has gone missing, and you don't seem to give a shit."

Buffy looked at the faces of every person in the room, and saw that not only Faith, but Dawn and Willow glaring at her. The fact that Willow was so obviously disapproving came as a surprise, since she had gone along with the plan to exclude Xander from their activities. "Will, I thought you agreed with me when I decided to keep Xander out," she protested.

Willow shook her head. "No, Buffy, I agreed that Xander shouldn't be getting involved in the actual Slayage. _You_ were the one who wanted to exclude him altogether. I didn't want him getting hurt. _You_ were the one who called him 'useless' and a 'liability'."

Faith's glare doubled in intensity. If looks could kill, Buffy would be reduced to pink mist. "You really don't get it, do you? How long do you think you would have lasted here if it wasn't for Xander?"

"If you're referring to the time in the Master's cave," Buffy shot back, as she hauled herself to her feet, "it was _Angel_ who brought _Xander_ along to..."

"Do you really believe that?" Dawn interrupted with a derisive laugh. "What reality are you living in again? 'Coz it's sure as hell not this one."

"I suppose Xander told you that it was him who dragged Angel along in an attempt to make himself seem useful," Buffy sneered.

"Actually, Buffy," Giles interjected, "while Xander did, indeed, recount that version of events, his story was backed up by Angel, who had no reason to lie in order to make Xander the hero of the story."

"And it was Xander who protected you, that Halloween," Willow put in.

"Xander got the rocket launcher that you used on the Judge," Dawn contributed.

"It was Xander's plan that beat the Mayor," Faith remembered.

"And the enjoining spell to defeat ADAM was also Xander's idea," Giles recalled.

Buffy looked from person to person, unable to believe that they'd _all_ turned against her like this. "Gii-iiles," she whined, falling back on her main defence.

"No, Buffy, that will not work this time," Giles said firmly. "Whether you choose to admit it or not, Xander has played a pivotal role in keeping you alive, and through you, ensuring the world's safety ever since you arrived in Sunnydale."

"And let's not forget _that_ dance," Willow said hotly.

"What dance?" Faith asked. She hadn't been in Sunnydale for that event, and no-one had told her of it.

"Oh, once my _bitca_ of a sister gave Xander the dance of a lifetime at the Bronze, before leaving him high and dry on the dance floor. The whole thing was a stunt to make Angel jealous," Dawn said, with just a hint of a snarl entering her voice.

"But... but..." Buffy stammered, desperately trying to muster a defence, when one appeared. "Xander had a schoolboy crush on me," she protested.

"And _that_ was a good thing to do?" Willow asked in an incredulous tone of voice. "Besides, if you think the only reason he was helping you, you're sadly mistaken. Remember that Valentine's Day love spell fiasco? If I recall correctly, all three of us," she continued, indicating Buffy, Dawn and herself, "tried to come on to Xander under the spell's influence, but he turned us all down. If a crush was all that was driving him, don't you think he would have taken advantage of the situation?"

Buffy could see her defence crumbling under the assault of Willow's logic, but she mad one last effort. "But it was him that blackmailed Amy into casting that spell in the first place!"

"Nice try, _sis_," Dawn riposted. "But even I know the spell was intended to get Cordy back. The only reason the rest of us were affected was that it went horribly wrong."

"Face it, Buffy," Willow put in. "Xander's well and truly gotten over any crush he might have had for you, helped by your attitude to him." She missed the brief hopeful expression that flickered across Faith's face, but Dawn didn't. Although Dawn made no mention of it, she _did_ make a mental note to ask Faith about it when the opportunity presented itself.

Buffy scowled at everyone present. "Fine," she sniffed. "Buffy's in the wrong - again. But what about this? Xander lied to me about the soul restoration spell. He told me that you said to 'kick his ass', Willow. If he's such a good little hero, explain _that_!"

"What? I told him to tell you that I was going to restore his soul!" Willow exclaimed. Buffy smirked slightly, seeing Willow's mood start to swing.

Giles cleared his throat. "Perhaps I can offer an explanation," he said.

Buffy folded her arms across her chest. "Fine," she said. "Knock yourself out. But it had better be good."

"Very well, since you insist. But I should warn you that you will *not* like how your actions are portrayed." He paused for a moment to allow Buffy to consider this. Continuing, he said, "Given your reluctance to properly deal with Angelus, despite all the innocent lives he took, and despite several opportunities to do so, I cannot believe that jealousy was the primary motivation for failing to inform you of that the soul restoration ritual was being attempted by Willow."

Giles removed his glasses and gave them a brief polish before replacing them. "Also, when you consider the additional circumstances; namely, that I was being held captive by Angelus, Kendra had been killed, you were being sought for questioning by the police in regards to Kendra's death, and that, at the time Willow was not only just a beginner practioner of magic, but was also injured and in the hospital, Xander's actions start to appear less reprehensible."

"Besides," Dawn added. "If he _had_ told you that Willow was going to try to restore Angel's soul, what would you have done? Would you have fought to win, or just to hold Angelus off long enough for Angel to come back?"

Realisation dawned on Willow as she made her contribution. "You would have probably held back, Buffy. And Angelus might have killed you, then opened Acathla and ended the world." An expression of disgust crossed her face. "I can't believe you were so _selfish_, Buffy. In fact, I'm starting to agree with what Xander did."

"WHAT?" Buffy screeched.

"You heard me, Buffy," Willow said resolutely. "While Angelus was killing people - including Jenny Calendar, don't forget - all you were concerned with was getting Angel back. I can't believe I ever accused Xander of jealousy whenever he said that Angelus should be staked just like any other vampire."

"Yes," Giles agreed. "At the time, I thought that Xander was the only one of the group who was displaying any common sense regarding how to deal with Angelus."

"You wanted me to stake... Angel?" Buffy nearly wailed.

"Not Angel," Dawn replied. "_Angelus_. Like you kept telling us, they weren't the same person. In fact, if we're going to say that they were one and the same person, why didn't you stake him as soon as you found out the Angel was simply Angelus with a soul?"

"Because he _had_ a soul!" Buffy exclaimed. "He was good! He was helping me!"

"But we're talking about why you didn't want to stake _Angelus_, Buffy. Y'know... the soulless version? Was your happiness more important than all the people he killed?"

That was too much for Buffy, who fled from the apartment, tears streaming down her face.

"Oh, dear," Giles murmured. "Do you think that we were possibly a little too hard on her?"

"No way, Giles," Faith replied, staring at the door. "She desperately needed a reality check, and we gave it to her."

********

**_Summers Residence_**

Joyce Summers was sitting at the dining room table, reading an art magazine and sipping on a cup of coffee when Buffy returned home in tears.

Concerned at the expression on her elder daughter's face, Joyce asked, "Buffy, honey? What's wrong?"

Buffy slumped into a chair next to her mother, still sobbing, and poured out the tale of what had happened at Giles' apartment. She finished up with a tearful, "Were they _right_, Mom? _Was_ I being incredibly selfish by wanting Angel back?"

Joyce thought long and hard about her reply. Not _what_ she was going to say - she already had a good idea of that - but _how_ she was going to say it. She could tell that Buffy was emotionally fragile at the moment, and bad things might happen if she said the wrong thing now. But she had to tell the truth.

"Yes," she said gently. Buffy gasped and stared open-mouthed, shocked, at her. "Why am I saying that? Well, from what the others told me, Angelus had killed a number of people - including Rupert's girlfriend, Jenny - and was trying to psychologically destroy all of you. Given that you normally eliminate a vampire on sight, the way you refused to deal with Angelus _does_ sound bad. Frankly, I'm not surprised that Rupert was unhappy with your actions, given everything Angelus did to him, particularly while he was trying to find out how Acathla worked."

Joyce watched Buffy's face as the realisation sank in, and her crying intensified. "I'm a terrible Slayer, aren't I? And a bad person, to boot," Buffy near-wailed.

"Of course not, honey," Joyce reassured her, moving to her side to give her a hug. "While it's true that you may have made some bad decisions, nobody's perfect. All that can be asked of you is that you do the best that you can."

********

**_Sunnydale Starbucks_**

It was said that Sunnydale was a 'one-Starbucks town'. This was true, and something of an indictment of the town, given the way that Starbucks franchises seem to multiply and proliferate like a virus - or a fungus, some said, given the taste of the coffee drinks they served.

Of course, in a town like Sunnydale, the range of available places to go if you wanted to relax with a friend over a cup of coffee _was_ limited to one... Starbucks.

So, it was no real surprise that when Dawn and Faith decided to make a quick stop on the way to the Magic Box - where they'd been sent to collect the required supplies for a locator spell - they wound up at the Starbuck franchise.

After ordering and collecting their cappachinos and securing a table, Dawn was the first to speak. "You really like Xander, don't you?" she asked bluntly.

"What?" Faith blurted, surprised. "I mean, yes, he's a really good friend, and he's the only other person apart from you, and lately, Giles, who's tried to be friends with me, and..."

"Not what I meant, Faith," Dawn interrupted the Willow-like babble. "You really _like_ him, don't you? There's no shame in admitting it."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Faith said off-handedly, taking a sip of her coffee in an attempt to buy time to rally her scattered thoughts.

_Gotcha!_ Dawn exulted inwardly, but the exultation was tinged with a slight amount of sadness. _What if he likes her the same way? I mean, he already only sees me as a little sister, rather than a potential girlfriend._ With an effort of will, she stopped that line of thought. _Well, if he_ does _like her that way, why should I interfere? If Faith makes him happy, then more power to her._

Dawn had been taking a sip of her own coffee in order to give her time to complete her own thoughts on the subject. With a new-found determination, she decided that if she couldn't have Xander for herself, she'd make damn sure her two best friends were happy. "I think you _do_ know what I'm talking about, Faith," she said giving Faith a level stare. "He's just a loveable goof, who just happens to have a great sense of humour... not to mention that he's damn cute, as well," she finished with a grin.

Faith tried to return the stare, but to her embarrassment, she found herself caving in with a sigh. "Fine. Alright, I really _do_ like him... yes, I do mean 'that way'. It's just that... no-one else has ever been so damn... decent to me, except for Linda, my first Watcher. And the way he managed to turn me down without hurting my feelings, that night when the Sisterhood of Jhe tried to open the Hellmouth, and then returned to make sure I was alright later that night... it just got to me. Plus, he's been nothing but friendly, even when your sister and Willow treated me with suspicion."

"Yeah, he's like that," Dawn replied. "If I was a couple of years older, I might be making a play for him myself. But I'm not, so I won't."

Faith's eyes narrowed. "Dawn, are you pondering what I think you're pondering?" she asked in her best Brain impersonation.

"Gee, I think so, Brain," Dawn replied in her best Pinky impersonation. "But what are we going to do with a mile-long bratwurst afterwards?"

Both teenagers burst into laughter. Faith was the first to recover. "Seriously, though, Dawn," she said. "Are you going to do what I think you're going to do? Try to set me up with Xander?"

"Who, me?" Dawn replied with exaggerated innocence. "Would I do a thing like that?"

"In a _heartbeat_, young lady," Faith replied, grinning.

"Well, let's get those supplies for the locator spell Giles and Willow want to cast," Dawn said, as she and Faith drained their coffees. "If we don't find Xander, I won't be able to set you up with him - even if that _was_ what I was planning."

********

**_Giles' Apartment._**

The ingredients were mixed, the incantation chanted, and it was a simple matter of waiting for the results, which weren't long in coming.

However, the results weren't what they were expecting, as with the magical equivalent of a raspberry, the spell fizzled out. "Well, I've never seen _that_ happen before," Willow commented.

"Neither have I," Giles agreed. "Even if Xander was... dead... there still should have been _something_ in the way of results. And this particular spell is good for locating someone virtually anywhere on the planet."

Faith and Dawn exchanged worried looks. "What does that mean, Giles?"

"I have no idea..." Giles started to say, before his voice trailed off, and he leapt to his feet, dashing over to the bookcase where the mystical research works he kept at home were stored. Returning to the table, the girls had just enough time to see part of the title, which was '...Compendium of Magical Transportation...' before he dropped it on the table and opened it to a particular page, which was headed, 'Discs of Kakulash', in rather ornate script.

"What's that, Giles?" Willow asked.

"The Discs of Kakulash are transportation devices. Xander... acquired one, and showed it to me, with the thought that I might find it useful. They only work in pairs - a 'send' disc and a 'return' disc - and since Xander only had the 'return' disc in his possession, I thought it would be safe to allow him to keep it. In fact, he only seemed interested in using it to decorate his apartment."

"Yeah, that sounds like Xander," Dawn muttered, then certain facts about Giles' previous sentence clicked. "Giles! You let Xander _keep_ one of those 'disc' thingies?"

"How could you, Giles?" Willow demanded. "You know what Xander's luck with magic is like! If there's a way for anything to go wrong with magic, Xander will unerringly find it!" Calming down, Willow continued, "Okay, it's probably a fair assumption that Xander's been taken... somewhere... by this 'Disc of Kakulash', right?"

"That would probably be correct, Willow," Giles agreed.

"Does your book say where the disc might have taken him?" Dawn asked.

"'The Disc may be used to go anywhere the user has knowledge of,'" Giles read from the book. "'Not limited by time, or by distance, or dimensional barriers.' That can be interpreted to read that Xander could not only be _anywhere_, but any_when_ as well. That's assuming that he even remained in this dimension."

"Great," Willow said, becoming more and more worried. "We've only got the entire _multiverse_ to search through; forget needle-and-haystack comparisons, this is like looking for a speck of dust in the Sahara."

"We'll find him, Willow," Dawn assured the redhead. "We have to."

********

**_Summers Residence_**

After the meeting had broken up, with Willow and Giles deciding to continue researching to try to find a way to determine where and _when_ Xander had ended up, Dawn returned home. Faith might feel vindicated in giving Buffy a serve like that, but now that the heat of the moment had faded, Dawn was feeling somewhat guilty.

As she wandered into the kitchen, Dawn saw her mother sitting at the table, holding a mug of coffee with both hands, taking an occasional sip while wearing a contemplative expression. "Mom?"

Her mother started slightly, obviously surprised. "Sorry, Dawn, but you surprised me," she replied, taking another sip of her coffee.

"Is Buffy home?"

"Yes, dear, she's in her room," her mother replied. "She's quite upset, too."

With that statement, Dawn felt a pang of guilt. "Ohmigod, I'm sorry, Mom. It's just that... Xander's gone missing, and Buffy didn't seem to care too much, and things got heated, and..."

"Wait a minute," her mother said, holding up a hand to cut off the flow of words. "Xander's missing?" she continued, obviously concerned. "Since when?"

"He hasn't been around for a couple of days," Dawn explained, taking a seat. "Faith and me were getting worried, so we went around to his place. The door was unlocked, and we went in... and he wasn't there, but all of his stuff was there, and his car as well. We were starting to _really_ worry, so we went around to Giles' place and told the rest of the gang. Giles and Willow went straight into near-panic, and Faith and me weren't much better, and like I said, Buffy didn't seem to care too much, and things went downhill from there."

Joyce took another sip of her coffee, starting to worry herself. From what she'd been told, Xander had been helping Buffy virtually ever since they arrived in Sunnydale; he'd even saved her life on a number of occasions, and more than once, his input had been critical to defeating whatever major enemy with plans of world domination/mass destruction the group had faced.

In fact, Joyce was wondering why Buffy had never really acknowledged Xander's contribution with so much as even a 'thank you'. She resolved to bring this up with her elder daughter... but right now would probably be a bad idea.

"So," Dawn finished, "I thought that I'd better apologise to Buffy."

"That's a good idea, dear."

Dawn nodded to her mother and made her way to Buffy's room. Unsurprisingly, the door was shut. It probably wasn't locked, but Dawn didn't want to simply barge in, so she knocked. "Yes?" she heard a muffled voice say.

"Can I come in, Buffy?" Dawn asked. "I really need to talk to you, and it'd be better if I didn't have to talk through the door."

"Yeah, whatever," even muffled, Dawn could pick the despondency in Buffy's voice.

Opening the door - it hadn't been locked - Dawn saw that Buffy was lying face-down on her bed. As Dawn entered the room, closing the door behind her, she saw Buffy lift her face from the pillow and turn to face her. Dawn was surprised to see tear tracks running down Buffy's cheeks, and that her eyes were red and puffy from crying. "I suppose you're going to finish what you started at Giles'," Buffy said bitterly.

That was definitely _not_ what Dawn had been about to do. Even though Buffy _had_ deserved to be taught a few home truths, Dawn was starting to feel ashamed of the way she'd given Buffy both barrels like that. "No way, Buffy," she said, sitting down on the bed next to her sister. "In fact, I want to apologise for laying into you the way I did."

Buffy's eyes widened when she heard Dawn say that. Sitting up, she leaned against the headboard, hugging her knees to her chest. "But you were right," she confessed. "I just realised that I haven't been much of a friend to Xander lately, have I? He's stuck with me, no matter what - even the time when Angelus... you know," she added, her voice trailing off, unable to complete the last sentence. "Even when me and Willow tried to push him away, he stayed. Not only that, he was the only one to reach out to Faith. God alone knows what might have happened if he didn't."

"Hey!" Dawn said with mock-annoyance. "I made friends with Faith, too, y'know."

Buffy smiled weakly. "Okay - Xander _and_ you were the only ones to make friends with Faith. But we're getting side-tracked here. The point is, I think the final straw was when I called Xander 'useless' and a 'liability'," she said, and tears threatened to start falling again with that last sentence.

"Yeah, that wasn't exactly your finest moment," Dawn agreed.

"No," Buffy said slowly, "I think my worst moment was that time with the Tilnrak' demons." She briefly recounted the fight, and what she'd said to Xander, and Dawn's expression went from shocked to disgusted to appalled during the short story.

_Must not rant... must not rave... must not grab one of Buffy's swords and chop her into a thousand tiny pieces_, Dawn thought, struggling with her temper. "You mean you just... left him there?" Dawn asked incredulously.

"Well, I was angry at him for nearly throwing his life away like that," Buffy confessed shamefacedly. "As I left, I saw the crossbow bolt in the tree near where my head was, but I didn't work out what it meant until much later."

"It meant that Xander saved your life _again_, stopping the demons from killing you with your own weapon," Dawn said.

Buffy nodded. "Yeah. Just one more to add to the number of times Xander's saved my life," she said, then sighed. "Y'know what? I wish there was a way that we could bring Xander back here, so I could apologise to him properly," she said mournfully.

"Be careful what you wish for, sis. This _is_ the Hellmouth after all."

"How could I forget that? And, yes, I still remember the debacle with Anyanka."

"Well, you've managed to convince me that you're sorry," Dawn said, giving Buffy a hug. "Now you just need to convince the others, probably starting with Faith."

"Yeah," Buffy responded, returning the hug. "She really likes Xander, doesn't she?"

"Well, like you said, he _was_ the first one to make friends with her. That sort of thing tends to leave an impression," Dawn said, letting Buffy go. "Get yourself tidied up, since we're going back to Giles' to patch things up."

********

**_Giles' Apartment_**

Giles and Willow were near-frantically leafing through various books, both to find out more about the Discs of Kakulash, and to see if there was any way of bringing Xander home. To their surprise, Faith was helping as well, despite showing no real interest in research in the past.

Willow was starting to have suspicions why Faith was so eager, and when Giles left the room to make another pot of tea, she decided to see if her suspicion was correct. "You really like him, don't you?" she asked quietly.

The way Faith's expression froze, for an instant resembling that of a deer caught in a car's headlights, told her that she was right. "Yeah," Faith replied. "He's a good friend, and..."

"Not what I meant, Faith," Willow replied, unknowingly echoing what Dawn had said to Faith earlier. "I mean 'like' as in _like_," she added.

Faith's shoulders slumped, as she realised that it was pretty futile to even try to deny it, as Willow was even more stubborn than Dawn. "Yeah," she said in a near-whisper.

Willow nodded resolutely. Even though her own feelings for Xander had faded slightly - she still thought of him as the big brother she'd never had, though - she was determined to make up for the way she'd treated him lately, and if setting him up with Faith was the way to do it, then...

_Woah! Where'd_ that _come from?_ she thought.

_You know_ exactly _where that came from_, a little voice in the back of her mind answered. _You can see that Faith is starting to fall for Xander big-time - that is, if she hasn't already fallen for him. And you know how stubborn and oblivious to the obvious the big goof can be. So you're going to meddle, aren't you?_

_Well, yeah_, she admitted silently and somewhat sheepishly. _But the whole thing is kinda moot unless we can find a way to get Xander back, isn't it?_

_Then what are you doing wasting your time talking to_ me_? Or, I should say,_ yourself, _since I'm just a figment of your imagination_.

"Jesus, Red," Faith muttered, using the nickname she'd bestowed on Willow as a sign of her agitation. "You should sit down and have a chat with Dawn."

Before Willow could ask what Faith had meant by that, the front door opened, and both Dawn and Buffy entered. Willow and Faith could tell that Buffy had been crying, and when she spoke, her voice still retained traces of tears. "I want to say... I'm sorry, guys, for putting you through everything that I have," she said softly but sincerely. "I haven't really been a good friend of late, have I?"

The raw emotion in her voice nearly overwhelmed Willow. "That's alright, Buffy," she said practically teleporting to Buffy's side and hugging her. "You've been under a lot of stress lately, haven't you?"

"That's no excuse, Willow," Buffy replied softly. "You, Xander and Dawn have done your best to help me, and I don't think I've ever thanked you for it. So, let me say, 'thank you, for all the help you've given me'."

"You're welcome, Buffy, although the times you've saved our lives - not to mention the world - could be considered a good enough 'thank you'."

"Saving lives is my _job_, Willow," Buffy protested.

"And I don't think we've ever thanked you enough for it, Buffy," Willow replied, while beside her sister, Dawn nodded and hugged Buffy as well.

Deciding not to argue any more, Buffy looked at Faith and added, "I owe you and Xander extra apologies, Faith; you for not trying to help you enough when you first arrived in Sunnydale, and Xander for not appreciating enough all he's done for me."

Faith waved off the apology. "No harm, no foul, Buffy," she said. "In fact, I think I should apologise for decking you earlier."

Buffy rubbed her jaw with a rueful grin. "It was a good shot," she said, before turning serious. "No apology need, Faith. I should have been more worried about Xander, and you drove that home to me in the most obvious way possible."

"'Salright, Buffy," Faith shrugged. "We good?"

"Five-by-five," Buffy replied, using an expression of Faith's. Both Slayers grinned at each other, the tension in the room abruptly broken.

Willow then took the opportunity to have a quiet word with Dawn. "Faith said I should have a chat with you. Any idea why?"

Dawn thought for a moment before replying, "I'm guessing you've noticed that she really likes Xander, as well."

Willow nodded. "The way she blew up at Buffy earlier was kind of a hint," she said with a small smile. "So what do we do about it?"

Dawn's smile was broad, and slightly malicious. "We meddle, of course."

"That's what I thought you'd say," Willow admitted. "But we're missing a crucial component for any relationship between Xander and Faith. To wit, Xander."

"Pfft," Dawn said airily. "A mere detail. You and Giles will get him back," she added confidently.

Willow was heartened by Dawn's confidence, but she wondered if it was deserved. After all, Xander could be _anywhere_; not to mention any_when_ if what Giles had found out about the Discs of Kakulash was true. _What are you doing now, Xander? Wherever or whenever you are?_ she thought with concern, especially given Xander's ability to unerringly find trouble no matter _where_ he was, which was compounded by his tendency to throw himself at whatever he thought was a worthy cause.

_Come back safely to us, Xander. I don't know what we'd do without you._


	9. A Birthday Party With A Twist

**_Title: In Their Shadow - Chapter 12_**

**_Author: Robert Cox (smeghead_76@dodo.com.au)_**

**_Disclaimer: Buffy is owned by Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy productions. The Night's Dawn trilogy is owned by Peter F. Hamilton. At least until the copyright runs out, anyway. Since that won't happen for a long time at the least, I've just gotta hope that no-one takes offence._**

**_Summary: Xander has been transported to the 27th century. Can he adapt to life in the future? Can he ever return home? And, more to the point, can the guy stay out of trouble for once?_**

**_Rating: M-15+ (Australian system)_**

**_AN: Thanks to Grossclout, who volunteered for beta-ing duties in the later parts._**

**_AN2: There are a couple of non-standard methods of communication used in this story, represented as follows:_ Affinity _ and _**{Datavises}

* * *

**_Cricklade Manor, Stoke County  
Kesteven Island, Norfolk  
9th June, 2614_**

After what was possibly the best night's sleep Xander had in a while and a hearty breakfast, he found himself perched on the stone steps of the manor house, idly chatting with Joshua, Louise and Gen while waiting for the arrival of Jay Hilton and her mother, Ruth. He was also taking the chance to have some more of the blanks about the time he was now in filled in. They weren't long in arriving, and Joshua wasted no time in introducing him to them. "Ruth, Jay, this is Xander Harris. Xander, this is Ruth Hilton, and her daughter, Jay."

"Hi," Jay chirped.

"Hello," Ruth added.

"Pleased to meet both of you," Xander said as he shook their hands.

"Are you a friend of Joshua and Ione?" Jay asked curiously.

Xander thought about it for a moment. "I guess so, even though I haven't known them for very long," he said determinedly _not_ making comparisons between Jay and Buffy at the age of sixteen, even though there was the same sort of similarity as there was between Dawn and Gen.

Ruth gave him a speculative look, while Jay accepted his statement at face value. "Okay," Jay said, and Ruth remained silent. However, it didn't take long for Gen to engage both of them in an animated conversation.

Making the most of the opportunity, Ruth said quietly to Joshua, "What's his story?"

"Trust me, Ruth," Joshua replied equally quietly. "It's something that would take too long to tell, and it's a story best told over several drinks. For now, let's just say he's trustworthy, and leave it at that, okay?"

Ruth simply raised an eyebrow, and made no comment. She was a very practical woman, but she was also fiercely protective of Jay. However, in the four years since she'd moved to Norfolk in the aftermath of the possession crisis, she'd also come to trust Joshua's judgement, particularly when it came to people. Watching the interaction between Xander and the two girls, she was starting to agree - although it was probably too early to come to any sort of final decision regarding the young man.

In lieu of asking any more questions, she instead asked, "When's Haile going to arrive?"

"She should be here soon," Joshua replied, before grinning suddenly. "I wish I knew what to get her as a present, though. What do you get for someone who can get pretty much whatever they want?"

Ruth found herself smiling as well, remembering Jay's excitable stories about her visit to the Kiint home system. One of the things she'd been really enthused about were the 'providers' which, as the name suggested, were able to replicate just about anything. Of course, Jay had demanded proof, and insisted that the provider assigned to her produce a statue and a vac-train carriage. The provider had produced the statue, fortunately convincing Jay before the vac-train carriage had arrived.

Seizing the opportunity, Jay had immediately asked for a starship capable of getting her home. The provider had refused, though, claiming that it had been prevented from doing so. After that, Jay had decided to make the best of things and had actually enjoyed her time with the Kiint.

Looking at Jay, she discovered that her daughter was telling Xander about the time she'd gone with Haile to visit a Corpus locus - the Kiint version of a school - her meeting with Vyano, a member of an aquatic sub-species of Kiint, with her excitement peaking when she described the Congressions, a multi-species meeting point, where ideas and technology could be shared. "There was only one thing you had to do to be able to take part," Jay told Xander. "That was, to be able to travel there. If you could make it, you were allowed to join in."

"That sounds amazing," Xander told her, his expression turning slightly wistful as he imagined the splendours Jay was telling him about.

Ruth's suspicions about Xander dwindled, but didn't vanish entirely. He _seemed_ trustworthy enough, and the fact that Joshua and Louise trusted him cut Xander a lot of slack... but before she passed final judgement on him, she'd have to have a talk with him herself.

Before she could say anything else though, a black dot appeared about fifty metres away, and expanded to a sphere about five metres in diameter in less than a second, its lower surface flush with the ground.

"What the..." Xander said softly.

"Don't worry about it, Xander," Jay said airily. "That's just Haile arriving."

As Jay finished her reassuring statement, the sphere vanished, to reveal...

_They must be Kiint_, Xander thought dazedly, as he looked at his first xenocs. They were pretty much as Joshua had described them, snow-white in colour, and two of them were the size that Joshua had said that adult Kiint were. The third was about half the size of the adults. _Must be Haile_. The presence of a human with the three Kiint went almost unnoticed.

"Why am I not surprised that _he_ turned up?" Joshua muttered with a grin.

"Be nice, Joshua," Louise rebuked him, swatting his arm. "You get along well enough with Richard, and besides..." she left the sentence unfinished, nudging him in the ribs and indicating Ruth, whose expression had softened - very slightly - as she smiled in Richard's direction.

A smirk began to spread across Joshua's face as the implications began to sink in.

{Joshua Calvert, you will stop grinning like that this instant!}

Joshua turned to look at his wife, who had datavised him in order to spare Ruth any embarrassment. {I have no idea what you're talking about, my dear. Would I do anything devious and underhanded to two of my friends?}

{If you thought you could get away with it; or if you thought it'd be good for a laugh... then, yes, you most definitely would.}

{Damn. Busted,} Joshua replied, trying not to grin or burst out laughing. Neural nanonic facial-expression override programs were so _useful_ in that regard. Louise's expression was equally neutral, which meant that she had a similar program in primary mode.

The two adult Kiint began to move sedately away from where they'd arrived. The juvenile - Haile - by contrast, broke out into what can only be described as a 'gallop', all eight legs working in a furious rhythm as she ran headlong towards Jay.

"Erm..." Xander muttered, moving slightly so that he was in between Jay and the charging Kiint.

"Don't worry about it, Xander," Jay repeated. "That's Haile." Slipping around him, she ran to meet Haile, squealing, "Haile!" as she ran.

Xander didn't notice that Joshua was standing beside him until he spoke up. "Well, Haile's gotten better at running," he remarked. "The last time I saw her, it was even money that she'd trip herself up on her own legs whenever she got excited."

"Huh?" Turning to face Joshua, Xander noticed the smirk on his face. "You set me up for this, didn't you?" he asked suspiciously.

"Nope. Up until a couple of days ago, I didn't even know you were going to visit," Joshua pointed out.

"Fair enough. But that doesn't mean that you're not finding this amusing, though."

"I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't," Joshua admitted. "Look on the bright side, though. No harm done, right?"

Before Xander could reply, Jay and Haile had met, hugged - Haile using some sort of tentacle in place of arms - and were having an animated conversation. Well, _Jay_ was talking, but it was obvious that Haile was replying _somehow_, since Jay was carrying her half of the conversation without too much difficulty.

Xander was about to ask Joshua what was going on, but he didn't get a chance before Jay led Haile over to him. "Haile, I'd like you to meet Xander. Xander, this is Haile."

Not knowing what else to do, Xander said, "Hi, Haile." He received a bit of a surprise, however, when Haile lifted a tentacle towards him. _I guess that's how she shakes hands_, he thought, and was about to give the tip a shake, when it suddenly writhed, and _changed_, so that Haile was no extending what, to all intents and purposes, was a hand. "Woah!" Xander exclaimed, startled.

"Hi Haile," Joshua said with a grin, before nudging Xander. "Go on, shake her hand," he prompted.

**Greetings, Joshua Calvert. Greetings, Xander.**

"She says 'hi', by the way," he added. Xander, of course, hadn't heard a word of this.

"Huh?" he said again, giving Joshua a blank look, before shaking Haile's hand. "I'm gonna get you for this, Calvert," he said mock-threateningly to Joshua.

"Yeah, yeah," Joshua said smugly. "It's been tried before, and I'm still here."

That's when Xander noticed that his palm was itching. Staring at his hand in amazement and not a little suspicion as the itch travelled along his arm and up his spine before seeming to settle somewhere in his skull. That was when his scalp started to tingle as well, causing him to absently scratch his head while still giving his hand an odd look.

Joshua had a fairly good idea of what Haile had done. **Did you do what I think you just did?**

**Yes**, Haile replied.

**Not that I'm complaining, but why?**

**Wanting to be able to communicate with Xander. It was the right thing to do, query?**

**Yeah, it was the right thing to do.**

**Gladness!**

**It just came as a bit of a surprise, that's all.**

**Sorrow. Not understanding.**

"There's nothing to be sorry about, Haile," Xander said, before he realised what was happening. "Hey! I... heard her," he continued in an amazed tone of voice, before turning to Joshua. "You told me that Kiint use something like affinity, right?" he asked, in a somewhat awed tone of voice.

"That's right," Joshua replied, grinning.

"But I don't have affinity," Xander continued, stating the blindingly obvious. "So how can I understand her?"

**You have thoughts of strength, Xander. Much difficulty to achieve conversation, but possible. Not so with most humans. Feel hopelessness. Failure sorrow.**

"Does that mean I have strong thoughts?" Xander asked, curious and interested. After all, this was the first truly unusual thing he'd experienced since his arrival, as opposed to merely being told about it, as he'd been in zero-tau during the voyage from Tranquillity to Norfolk.

"Something like that," Ione agreed, her tone amused, which caused Xander to send a suspicious look her way. Ione's expression was utterly innocent, but Xander wasn't entirely convinced.

Shrugging - he could ask her about it later - he turned to Haile and said, "I've been told that today is your birthday."

**Yes. Today is the day of my birth. By human reckoning, I am four years old. Puzzlement remains, though; purpose of celebrating day, query?**

Xander managed to piece together enough of what Haile had just said to understand that she was now four, and that she was asking why humans celebrated birthdays. Shrugging, he replied, "I'm not sure, Haile. I guess we've been doing it for long enough that it's become traditional." He thought for a moment, and then added, "Well, you _do_ get presents, and you get to spend time with your friends."

**Presents, query? Purpose, query?**

Xander rubbed at the back of his head as he thought. "Yeah, the person whose birthday it is gets given gifts," he said. "I don't know why; I guess that's part of the tradition." He was amazed that he was taking this so normally; after all, he _was_ talking - sort of, anyway - with an alien, and doing so in _English_. Sure, it was broken English, and some of the words and phrases were somewhat confusing, but it was good enough English that he could understand it.

His thoughts on the subject were interrupted when Joshua led the two adult Kiint and the human who'd accompanied them over to him. "Xander, I'd like you to meet Nang and Lieria, Haile's parents, and Richard Keaton, who used to be a Kiint observer. What he is now is anyone's guess," Joshua said with a grin. "Dick, Nang, Lieria, this is Xander Harris."

_Just go with it_, Xander reminded himself. _It'll stop you from going insane or having a stroke or something_. With that decision made, he stuck out his hand. "Hi."

Richard grinned and shook his hand. "Hi, Xander. Feel free to call me Dick. Joshua seemed to have no trouble with that," he said, which caused some mild confusion until Xander figured it out, which caused him to snicker briefly.

"I will, but not like Joshua seemed to mean it," he said, still snickering, before turning to face the two adult Kiint. "Hi, Nang, Lieria."

**Greetings, Xander Harris**, the two Kiint 'said' together, then Nang continued, **You are originator of Harris File, query?**

"Harris File?" Xander asked, somewhat confused.

"Erm, that would be my fault," Ione admitted. "When Tranquillity and I realised the implications of the data from your debrief nanonics, I sent it to the Confederation assembly - think of it as the equivalent to the United Nations - and the governments of some of the more important planets, such as Earth, New California, Kulu, New Wasington, Petersberg and Oshanko."

**The Confederation Assembly shared the information with Corpus**, Lieria added. **Corpus was most disturbed by the information. The supernatural is not something our race has encountered, except for possession.**

"Really?" Xander asked. "I thought that with your long history, you would have run into _something_ like that before."

**Incorrect. Corpus theorises that that is because the creatures you have encountered are limited to Earth.**

"Oh," Xander said. "Yeah, that would make sense, I guess, unless there are Hellmouths to be found on other planets."

**Hellmouth, query?**

"'Ruptures in the barriers between dimensions', as Giles said," Xander replied. "I guess they're called Hellmouths because what's on the other side... well, if it isn't Hell, it's close enough to be _called_ Hell."

**Understood.**

"But there's one thing I'm curious about," Xander added. "If - what was it again? Corpus? - has only found out about this sort of thing recently, then how do you know about it?"

**Corpus disseminates knowledge, makes it available for all who wish to know and learn**, Nang replied. **What we learn here today will be added to Corpus' knowledge.**

"Okay," Xander said slowly. "This may be a slightly stupid question, but what _is_ Corpus, exactly?"

Unknown to Xander, both Ione and Joshua had been filling Richard in on some of the most important details of Xander's story via affinity. Richard then stepped forward to field the question. "Corpus is the Kiint version of Consensus," he explained. Xander nodded - that was one of the things that Ione had explained to him earlier. "But in some ways, Corpus is more advanced than Consensus. Which is not surprising, really, given the fact that the Kiint have had Corpus for nearly two hundred thousand years, as opposed to just over five hundred for the Edenists and Consensus. Basically, they've had a _lot_ more practise with it."

"That sounds reasonable," Xander admitted. "But if Corpus has seen the 'Harris File', what more do you expect to learn? After all, the information in that file _was_ taken from my memories," he added. "What else is there that I can add?"

**Unknown, but any new information will be accepted by Corpus and analysed**, Lieria replied. **Corpus also feels that you should be informed of events on Earth.**

"Why? What's been happening on Earth?"

"Apparently, there's a Master Vampire causing trouble in the Sunnydale Dome of the Los Angeles arcology," Ione replied. "Both the LAPD and Govcentral are trying to figure out what he's up to, but no luck so far."

"Sunnydale Dome?" Xander asked in amazement.

"In the mid-twenty-fifth century, the Los Angeles arcology was hit by a massive earthquake, followed by an armada storm," Ione explained. "Five domes were destroyed, resulting in tens of millions of deaths - to this day, the exact number is unknown. In an effort to avoid anything like that happening ever again, it was decided to shift the arcology - by building replacement domes and any new domes to the north-east of the city. About twenty years ago, the slow but steady migration of the arcology had reached the site of Sunnydale, and a dome was erected there. Incidentally, the official name of the dome is Dome Thirteen."

"Unlucky number," Xander muttered, before continuing in a louder tone of voice. "There's a Hellmouth under Sunnydale," Xander said, "which I'm pretty sure you already know. This new Big Bad probably intends to open it, which really shouldn't come as a surprise."

**That is true. Consequences of opening Hellmouth, query?**

"Demons overrunning the planet, Hell on Earth, return of the Old Ones... that sort of thing," Xander replied, wondering where this was going.

"Old Ones?" Joshua asked.

"The 'original' demons," Xander replied. "Y'know, the ones that would probably shrug off a direct hit from a nuke."

Joshua and Ione shuddered slightly at that, as did Richard and the two adult Kiint a moment later - which, in the case of the Kiint, was fairly impressive to see, as the shudder rippled along their bodies, carrying on to the thin tentacles of shape-shifting flesh. Xander wondered about that for a moment, before he saw the slightly preoccupied expressions that both Joshua and Ione wore. _They're using affinity to explain what the 'original' demons are_, he realised. For a moment, he felt slightly offended that they hadn't asked him, but then he realised that affinity was probably a better was to describe the concept. He made a note to pry more details about affinity from either Ione or Joshua, or any Edenist he got the chance to meet.

**This is disturbing information**, Nang said. **Recent developments on Earth add to our unease**.

"Really?" Xander asked, curious. "What's happened?"

Ione quickly summarised the Henderson Report, with particular reference to the nasty three-way firefight between Jonsson and his minions, the local Light Bringer coven and Los Angeles Police Department Armed Tactical teams. Xander winced at that, but when Ione described the message she'd received from the 'Slayerettes', his eyes widened with amazement and he started stammering, "Slayerettes? But that's... I mean... what the hell?"

"Apparently, ever since your time, there's been a group of people who fight vampires in the Sunnydale/Los Angeles area called Slayerettes," Ione explained. "Sometimes, they've been joined by a Slayer - on rare occasions, by both Slayers - but more often than not, they've worked without the support of a Slayer."

"You mean that there's still two Slayers?" Xander asked. "I thought the thing with Buffy and Kendra - later, Faith - was a one-time deal only."

"Well, assuming that you were telling the truth about how the first Slayers were called," Ione theorised aloud - ignoring the vaguely insulted look on Xander's face - "maybe there was a perceived need for more than one Slayer. In fact, I wouldn't be too surprised if there were more Slayers on Earth, or even if they didn't know what they were."

"What do you mean?" Xander asked, still looking hurt that his integrity had been doubted.

"Well, let's assume for the sake of argument, that the supernatural - vampires, demons, and the like - population of Earth is about one ten-thousandth of the human population. Given that Earth's population is about forty billion, that would mean..." Ione left the sentence unfinished, and looked at Xander expectantly.

_She wants me to work it out_, he realised, grimacing slightly. Maths had never been his strong point, but this was simply a case of taking a number that was mostly zeroes, and lopping a few of the said zeroes from the end. _Let's see... forty billion is a four, followed by ten zeros. A ten-thousandth of that means that four zeroes are removed, leaving... holy shit!_

"Four million," Xander said in a near whisper. Something nagged at his mind, which led him to perform the same calculation for Earth's early twenty-first century population. "But that would mean that there were six hundred thousand vampires, demons and other supernatural critters on Earth in my time. If that's the case, how come we weren't overrun back then?"

"Probably a few reasons," Ione answered, and began ticking points off on her fingers. "Firstly, apart from a thankfully rare number of cases, the vampires and demons were unorganised and lacked leadership. Secondly, at the start of the twenty-first century, Earth's population was spread out over the planet's surface, as opposed to being concentrated in the arcologies. Thirdly, a large number of demons wanted little more than to be allowed to live in peace. And fourthly, there were probably vampire and demon hunting groups in other nations as well."

Xander nodded at that, conceding the point. "And now?" he prompted.

"The vampires in the Sunnydale Dome are starting to become more organised, probably in the rest of the Los Angeles arcology as well," Ione replied. "Sure, it looks like it's only in the one place, but it's in what is quite possibly the worst possible place. Also, Earth's population _is_ more concentrated, although people are starting to move to the other planets sharing Earth's orbit. Although there is the potential that some of the more resourceful vampires will manage to slip onto one of the population transfer ships. And although modern weapons have become more effective against vampires, there's still no small-arms weapons capable of killing a vampire with a single shot, and a worrying development is that reports from the Los Angeles arcology indicate that vampires are starting to use modern weaponry themselves."

That raised a number of points in Xander's mind, which he had no hesitation in voicing. "Would vampires be able to survive on another planet?" he asked. "And would they be able to create more vampires?"

**There is no reason why not**, Lieria replied. **From available information, it would seem that the demon which inhabits a human body would be able to be summoned on other worlds, although it would probably be more difficult. Also, vampires who travel away from Earth would probably be weaker, although still stronger than unaugmented humans. It is impossible to say, however, what the effect would be on vampires created on other worlds.**

"Fair enough," Xander agreed. "The fact that they're starting to use weapons is a worry, though."

"True," Joshua agreed. "Then again, your group was reluctant to use the weapons available to you, too," he pointed out.

"Yeah," Xander said with a shrug. "Then again, we weren't given any real chance to research which weapons would be effective against vampires, so we pretty much stuck to what we knew would work," he added.

Both Joshua and Ione nodded. That point of view made sense to them.

There was one more major concern on Xander's mind, though. "If the situation on Earth is starting to look grim, maybe I should-"

"_No_," Ione and Louise said firmly and simultaneously.

"But-"

"_NO_," the two women repeated. "Besides," Ione added, "there's a near-frightening amount of military resources now being focused on the Los Angeles arcology. To be honest, there's no real rush, and you badly need a real vacation. Which you will have, understood?"

Xander opened his mouth to protest once more, but Joshua cut him off before he could speak. "Don't bother trying to argue, Xander," he said. "When Ione and Louise get like this, there's no budging them."

"I'm not going to get out of this, am I?" Xander asked.

"Nope."

"So I'd better make the best of it, then?"

"Yep."

"Thought so."

Their attention was drawn by a loud, "A-_hem_" from behind Xander. Turning around, he saw Jay and Gen, with determined expressions, their arms folded across their chests... and both of them were tapping a foot, indicating displeasure. "Stop talking about bad things happening on Earth, and enjoy Haile's birthday party," Jay said in an annoyed tone of voice, indicating the young xenoc who stood between them.

"I'm guessing that this is something else I'm not going to get away with, am I?" Xander asked, a grin tugging at the corners of his mouth.

"I'd say so," Ione replied, grinning.

"Fine," Xander said, surrendering gracefully for what was almost the first time in his life. He caught a glimpse out of the corner of his eye, and turned to see...

"Well, well, well," he said with a smirk. "What _do_ we have here?"

Richard and Ruth had decided to leave everyone else to their own devices, and were now sitting quite close together on the steps of the manor house, talking quietly. Seeing this, Xander's smirk began to blossom into a full-blown grin. He and Joshua exchanged glances, and he saw that a similar grin was adorning Joshua's face.

"You think..." Xander began.

"I wonder if..." Joshua said.

Whatever plot they were hatching was aborted when they heard, from behind them -

"Joshua Calvert..."

"Alexander Harris..."

Turning around, they saw Ione and Louise both levelling semi-hostile glares at them. "Uh-oh," Xander said. "We're in trouble, aren't we?"

"Yep," Joshua replied.

"Thought so. But why is Ione looking at me like that? Why should I be in the same trouble with her as you seem to be in with Louise?"

"Dunno. But it'd probably be interesting finding out."

"I'm not so sure if I want to find out."

"Wuss."

"Hey, after what you've _both_ told me about Dominique, I'm not going to take any chances."

"Like I said; wuss."

"Shut up."

Joshua immediately went to Plan G - G for Grovel, that is. Making florid apologies, he went on for a couple of minutes before he noticed that Louise was looking more amused than anything. "What do you think, Ione? Has he grovelled enough?"

Ione pretended to think about it. "Nice use of the English language," she commented. "His sincerity is somewhat dubious, but then again, this _is_ Joshua we're talking about here, so that's _always_ in some doubt. On a scale of one to ten? About a seven, I'd say."

"I'll give him an eight," Louise replied.

"Then again, you're hardly an impartial observer."

"Come now, Ione. If that was true, I'd give him a steady string of 'ten's and you know it."

"Good point."

Joshua, by this time, had stopped apologising. "You see what I have to put up with every time those two get together?" he complained to Xander.

"Quit whining," Xander replied. "You love it, and you know it."

"All right, I don't find it entirely annoying. But you'd think they'd take my attempts to make amends just a little more seriously, though."

"Yeah, you'd think - unless, of course, you've had to apologise to them so many times that they're starting to grade your apologies... oh, wait, that's what they just did."

The women's stern visages cracked for a moment as they fought grins, then the stern looks returned as they turned their gazes on Xander. "And what do _you_ have to say for yourself?" Ione demanded.

"Er... I'm really sorry?" Xander replied.

"And?" Louise prompted.

"And it won't happen again - at least, not on purpose, anyway."

Ione appeared to consider this. "What do you think, Louise? Is he really sorry?"

Louise thought about it for a moment. "Hmm. Not as florid as Joshua's apologies, but he _seemed_ to be more sincere. But he _did_ weaken it with that last qualifier. I'd have to say... yes, he really meant it."

"Out of ten?"

"Eight to eight-and-a-half."

"Perhaps a nine?"

"I think that's going a bit far, Ione."

While Ione and Louise were discussing their attempts at apologising, Xander muttered to Joshua, "Do they do this _every_ time?"

"Pretty much, yeah," Joshua replied.

"That's what I was afraid you'd say."

Joshua raised his voice slightly. "Ladies, if you've finished critiquing our apologies, I think we should join the party before two very determined young ladies decide to lynch us."

********

Strangely enough - or perhaps not so strangely - Xander enjoyed the day immensely. Maybe it was because he simply let himself relax and enjoy himself, or maybe it was the company; pretty much everyone seemed determined to make sure he enjoyed himself.

Whatever the reason, though, when it came time to pack everything away and bid farewell to Haile, her parents and Richard, Xander found himself feeling just a little unhappy. "You'll write, yeah?" he said to Haile, just before she teleported back to Riynine.

**I will endeavour to communicate if that is possible, Xander**, Haile replied.

"Good to hear." He found that he had to wait a moment before making his farewells to Richard, as he and Ruth were exchanging brief hugs, while Jay was rolling her eyes. So he said goodbye to Nang and Lieria, instead.

**Farewell, Xander Harris**, Lieria said. **Meeting you has proven to be an interesting and rewarding experience**.

"Same here," Xander replied. He saw that Richard and Ruth's hug wasn't as brief as he first thought. He shared a grin with Joshua, but both refrained from making any comment, as both Ione _and_ Louise had extracted a promise from them that they wouldn't, on pain of... well, _pain_, to be honest.

Eventually, Xander was able to say goodbye to Richard, and the four of them teleported back to Riynine. "Well, now what?" Xander asked.

"Unfortunately, I have to get back to Tranquillity," Ione replied. "I told the _Alkazzor_'s crew that I'd be back sometime today, and I have to get back to Tranquillity as soon as possible."

"Damn shame, that," Xander said with a hint of regret.

"Oh, I'm reasonably confident that you'll get another chance to visit Tranquillity before all this is over," she reassured him, which seemed to cause him to brighten somewhat.

"Well, in that case, we'd better get you to Colsterworth," Joshua said, as a couple of the domestic staff began loading her luggage onto a farm ranger. "There should be just enough time to get there before the next train leaves for Boston."

********

**_Colsterworth Station, Stoke County  
Kesteven Island, Norfolk  
9th June, 2614_**

They made it with a few minutes to spare and, as Ione's luggage was being loaded into the baggage compartment of the train, they made their farewells. "It's your turn to visit me next time," Ione said as she hugged Joshua, then Louise, and then Genevieve. "You know that, don't you?"

"Of course," Joshua said with a grin.

Ione then turned to Xander, who'd hung back slightly during all of this. "And you'd better visit Tranquillity before you head back to where and when you belong, you got that?" she said mock-severely.

"Yes, Ione," Xander said with a grin, before his expression turned more serious. "Also, thanks. For... everything."

"You're welcome," she replied, giving Xander a hug. Before anything else could be said, though, the station master announced that the train was due to depart. Giving them one last hug each, Ione boarded the train, turning at the door to wave at them before she went to find her compartment.

"Back to Cricklade, I suppose," Joshua said, as he turned to head back to the farm ranger.

********

**_Cricklade Manor, Stoke County  
Kesteven Island, Norfolk  
9th June, 2614_**

Duke had just set, and there was still about half an hour until Duchess rose, which meant that Xander could quite clearly see the bright dot that was the _Alkazzor_'s spaceplane as it headed for orbit and rendezvous with the blackhawk.

For some strange reason, Xander felt... melancholy. After all, Ione _had_ been the first person to try to help him adjust to his strange new surroundings, and now she was leaving, heading back to the responsibilities she'd left behind to bring him here, where he would hopefully find someone else to help him. From brief acquaintance, it would seem that Joshua, Louise and Genevieve would provide that help.

Sitting comfortably on the steps leading up to the main entrance of Cricklade, Xander considered his situation. For the first time in a few years, he'd been offered the chance at a _real_ vacation, along with the reason why he was being held back from the action. He'd do his best to enjoy the rest, although knowing that the vampires and demons that he'd fought at Buffy's side in Sunnydale were still active might temper that enjoyment. His contemplation was interrupted when Joshua sat down next to him, with a bottle of Norfolk Tears in one hand, and a couple of glasses in another. Sitting down next to Xander, he opened the bottle and poured a drink, which he handed to Xander before pouring one for himself.

"Nice night," Joshua remarked, to open the conversation.

"Yeah, it is, actually," Xander replied.

"So, what's on your mind?"

"A few things, actually. Starting with wondering how the gang back home are doing, sort-of wishing I was on Earth... that sort of thing."

"I know the feeling," Joshua replied with a chuckle. "When Ione asked me to go look for the Sleeping God, part of the reason I accepted so quickly was a desire to make a contribution, find a solution, the usual." He took a sip of the Tears before continuing, slightly more seriously, "But you _do_* realise that you've been given the chance to have a proper vacation, don't you?"

Xander took a sip of his own drink, gasping slightly as it warmed his stomach. "Yeah, and I fully intend to make the most of it," he said. "But I just can't shake the feeling that I should be helping, y'know?"

"Yeah," Joshua said.

There was a brief moment of silence, before Joshua spoke up again. "So, tell me more about your friends back home."

Xander looked at him, slightly surprised. "Didn't Ione share the information from my debrief nanonics with you?"

"Yes, but you telling me about them yourself helps me to get a better understanding of them," Joshua replied.

"Sounds reasonable," Xander admitted, taking another sip of his drink to give him to decide where to start.

"Well, first up, there's the Slayers. Buffy Summers and Faith Williams..."

********

**_Belvior Palace, Tranquillity  
Tarron orbit, Kulu system  
12th June, 2614_**

Tranquillity watched on as the massive transport operation continued, with the counter-rotating spaceport stretched to its full capacity - if not a little further - to accommodate the huge numbers of vessels using it.

Voidhawks, blackhawks, and Adamist starships, all arriving and departing for one purpose - to transport serjeants to the Jovian habitats, where they would be imbued with a personality pattern from the multiplicity consciousness and conduct final training before being deployed to the O'Neill Halo and from there, to Los Angeles.

The reason for the final period of training was simple - the personalities taking control of the serjeant bodies would require time to adjust to the fact that they had bodies once more, after years without one. After all, the personalities were those of Edenists who had died and transferred their memories to their habitat's neural structure.

A similar thing had been necessary prior to the commencement of the Mortonridge Liberation, but Tranquillity knew that the training would, by necessity, be a more rushed affair. Another point of concern was the even more limited time available for the controlling personalities of the serjeants to familiarise themselves with the weapons they would be equipped with.

Tranquillity also knew for a fact that Jupiter's geneticists were constructing as many serjeants as possible in the time frame available, and that Tranquillity's own birthing chambers were working overtime.

Fortunately, there was a pre-existing supply of ready-made serjeants. Ever since the possession crisis - and the Mortonridge Liberation - a full brigade of five thousand serjeants had been created and stored in zero-tau, ready for such a contingency. It might not be necessary, but preparation was always a good thing.

Ione had not yet returned from Norfolk, but that did not worry Tranquillity unduly, as it was capable of supervising the transport efforts.

Just then, another blackhawk swallowed in to one of Tranquillity's emergence zones. An affinity hail identified it as the _Alkazzor_, the blackhawk that Ione had travelled to Norfolk on.

**Welcome back, _Alkazzor_**, Tranquillity said.

**Thank you, Tranquillity**, was the reply.

**May I speak to Ione Saldana, please?**

**Of course**, the blackhawk replied.

**Trying to usurp me, are you?** a new affinity 'voice' said as it entered the affinity band. Tranquillity knew immediately that it was Ione.

**I am more than capable of supervising the loading of zero-tau pods into starships**, Tranquillity replied, somewhat miffed, even though it knew that Ione had been teasing.

**Temper, temper**, Ione chided gently, with the affinity equivalent of a smile.

Tranquillity 'sighed'. Ione seemed to derive an almost perverse pleasure from teasing it, knowing full well that it couldn't stay upset at her for any length of time. How could it? After all, Ione had been almost a part of the habitat for many years, waiting to inherit her role as the Lord of Ruin.

**How are things going?** Ione asked, all seriousness now.

**There have been no major problems**, Tranquillity replied. This was basically true, although there had been a few near-misses between Adamist starships and voidhawks/blackhawks, only averted by the incredible agility of the bitek starships.

That was almost to be expected, given the massive volume of traffic using Tranquillity's spaceport. The traffic controllers had been performing exceptionally well, and Tranquillity made a note to get Ione to publicly praise them for their work.

**How much longer until the last of the serjeants are loaded?** Ione asked.

**Another day or two**, Tranquillity replied. **After that, the next batch of two hundred should be ready in approximately a week or so.**

Tranquillity could feel Ione's raised eyebrow through the affinity band. **That's an interesting bit of initiative you took there,** she said.

**I deemed it necessary**, Tranquillity responded. **It seems likely that the campaign against the vampires will be long and drawn-out.**

**I wasn't criticising**, Ione assured the habitat. **It's a good idea, and one I was about to propose myself when I got back. But since you took it upon yourself, that's one thing I don't have to do. Speaking of which, how huge is the pile of datawork waiting for me?**

**Not as mountainous as you might suspect**, Tranquillity said. **The greater part of it only required an acknowledgement, which I was able to handle. The social invitations were able to be handled with the cover story we concocted to explain your absence. As for the remainder, which requires a decision from you, I have prepared a series of proposed solutions for you, and you only need to select one to implement.**

**My, my**, Ione chuckled. **You *have* been a busy little habitat, haven't you?**

**I was only fulfilling a duty to the population, as you well know**. There was a slight amount of censure in the affinity 'voice', and Ione winced slightly.

**I know, I know. But I couldn't just load Xander on to a blackhawk - still in his zero-tau pod, no less! - and ship him off to Norfolk to dump on Joshua like a mystery parcel. I had to explain to the both of them the reasons for my actions. And a message flek simply would not have cut it.**

**I understand. How was the visit to Norfolk?**

_How was seeing Joshua again, you mean?_ Ione thought, knowing that that was what the habitat had _really_ been asking, but was too tactful to say straight out.

**It was... strange.**

**I understand.**

Ione _knew_ that Tranquillity understood her conflicting emotions perfectly. After all, she had had two children with Joshua, and those sort of feelings tend to linger. Thinking about Joshua was enough to bring up thoughts of the children.

Marcus, who was still an embryo in zero-tau, waiting for when he would be 'born', in time to take up his role as the fourth Lord of Ruin, and Katlyn, now in the care of her best friend, Dominique Vasilkovsky - _and probably being given an advanced course in 'How to manipulate people to get what you want'_, Ione thought with a chuckle.

While she had been thinking, the _Alkazzor_ had reached its designated docking pedestal and landed, radiating a subliminal feeling of gratitude as the nutrient tubes found the correct orifices in the bitek starship, which began to feed.

A few minutes later, Ione and the crew were standing in the arrival area of the spaceport, having been waved through Customs pretty quickly. Being the undisputed ruler of the habitat did have its advantages.

Just then, a loud cry grabbed Ione's attention. "MUMMY!"

Whipping her head around towards the source of the shout, Ione saw her three-year-old daughter barge through the people between her and her mother, moving as gracefully in the free-fall environment as someone geneered for the space industry.

Grabbing Katlyn and sweeping her up into a huge hug. Looking over Katlyn's shoulder, Ione saw the robust figure of Dominique following more sedately.

Smiling at her daughter, who was energetically telling her about the fun she had had with 'Aunty Dominique', and 'Uncle Clement', and 'Granpa Parris', and 'Granma Simone', and swimming almost every day in the small salt-water sea that was at the southern end of the biosphere cavern, Ione reflected that the brief separation hadn't seemed to cause too many problems.

"Was she any trouble, Dom?" Ione asked Dominique.

"Heavens, no," Dominique replied in her slightly husky voice, shaking her head so that her blonde hair waved from side to side in the reduced gravity. "She was a perfect little angel."

Ione glanced suspiciously at Dominique, before deciding to take her word for it. _I can always find out later from Tranquillity if she'd caused any trouble_, she decided.

"How was Joshua?" Dominique asked.

_Same old Dominique_, Ione reflected with a small smile. _She never changes_.

"He's settling in to the role of a landowner surprisingly well," she replied. "He even gave me a present to bring back with me."

"Really?" Dominique asked with a sly grin.

"Nothing like that, so get your mind out of the gutter!" Ione exclaimed with a laugh. "Just some cases of Norfolk Tears, that's all."

"Ooohh, you lucky girl you!" Dominique exclaimed enviously, and with good reason. Norfolk Tears was the most expensive and sought-after alcoholic drink in the entire Confederation, and the value of the gift that Joshua had given her was probably in the tens of thousands of fuseodollars.

Hearing Joshua's name mentioned, Katlyn decided that she had to make a contribution. "Daddy!"

Ione smiled at her. "Yes, that's right. I was seeing your Daddy. Here, he gave me this to give to you." Setting Katlyn down, she reached into one of the cargo containers that was being pushed by a servitor behind her and pulled out a large stuffed doll, which she gave to Katlyn, who stared at it, entranced, before seizing it and hugging it to her chest.

Joshua and Louise visited as often as the duties of running their estate would allow them, determined to play what roles they could in Katlyn's upbringing, and it hadn't taken too long for Katlyn and Fletcher to become fast friends.

One of the first presents that Joshua had given Katlyn had been a small stuffed Kiint-doll which, Ione reflected, had been a perfect gift, given that young Kiint were just so damned _cute_.

"What's going on?" Dominique asked, waving a hand to indicate the activity going on all around them.

"I'm sorry, but I can't tell you," Ione replied. "But it's nothing as bad as when Capone attacked, that I can promise you."

"That's a relief," Dominique said with feeling.

Although Capone's attack had been seen off - evaded by swallowing to the Sol system, more accurately - that had still been quite a nasty moment for the residents, watching the antimatter-powered combat wasps bore in on the defenceless habitat. Which was probably why the parties celebrating their survival had been so... boisterous and exuberant.

That hadn't been the only swallow manoeuvre the habitat had made, though, although the second swallow manoeuvre had been somewhat more gentle.

Once the crisis had been resolved, Ione had decided to make another swallow manoeuvre, not back to Mirchusko, but to Kulu, where she offered Tranquillity's services as a base of operations for Kulu's Helium-3 mining operations. With some trepidation, but remembering Tranquillity's role in the Mortonridge Liberation, King Alistair II had accepted, and some deft media work had ensured that the rests of the population had accepted the habitat as well. Interestingly enough, Tranquillity had become something of a tourist attraction.

"Enough serious talk," Ione said, taking Katlyn by the hand and looping her other arm through Dominique's elbow. "What good stuff did I miss while I was on Norfolk? I want all the dirt, girl!" she added with a laugh.

As Dominique filled her in on the latest social gossip, she wondered if she should mention Xander to Dominique. _Nope_, she decided. _I think I'll wait until he pays his return visit, and spring him on Dominique as a surprise. I wonder how he'll react? For that matter, I wonder how_ she'll _react_.

Listening to Dominique's gossip with most of her attention, she asked Tranquillity, **Can you prepare a message to send to Saturn? More specifically, the habitat Romulus?**

**Certainly. Who is it to be addressed to?**

**Syrinx, captain of the _Oenone_.**

**I'll have the wording ready in a few minutes**, Tranquillity assured her, **subject to your approval, of course. Do you wish me to charter a blackhawk specifically for the task, or would you prefer that the message be sent with one of the blackhawks carrying serjeants to the Jovian habitats?**

**Charter, I think.**

**As you wish.**


	10. Taking Leave

**_Title: In Their Shadow - Chapter 13_**

**_Author: Robert Cox (smeghead_76@dodo.com.au)_**

**_Disclaimer: Buffy is owned by Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy productions. The Night's Dawn trilogy is owned by Peter F. Hamilton. At least until the copyright runs out, anyway. Since that won't happen for a long time at the least, I've just gotta hope that no-one takes offence._**

**_Summary: Xander has been transported to the 27th century. Can he adapt to life in the future? Can he ever return home? And, more to the point, can the guy stay out of trouble for once?_**

**_Rating: M-15+ (Australian system)_**

**_AN: Thanks to Grossclout, who volunteered for beta-ing duties in the later parts._**

**_AN2: There are a couple of non-standard methods of communication used in this story, represented as follows:_ Affinity _ and _**{Datavises}

* * *

**_Habitat Romulus  
Saturn orbit, Sol system  
14th June, 2614_**

**Syrinx.**

The response was a somewhat incoherent mumble.

**Syrinx.**

**Go 'way.**

The habitat personality considered the options available to it, before deciding that it wasn't worth the aggravation trying to wake Syrinx, and simply left the message in her mind, where she could 'read' it once she woke up, which she did about an hour later.

Of course, she wasn't in the best of moods, feeling rather annoyed with the personality for interrupting her sleep like that. The first thing she noticed was the fact that the reason her sleep had been disturbed was that a message had arrived for her, from Ione Saldana. _Breakfast first_, she decided. Hopefully, she would be more coherent after a good meal and some coffee.

Beside her, Ruben stirred into wakefulness. "Good morning, Syrinx," he said, sounding far too cheerful. Her ire was dampened somewhat when he gave her a quick kiss. "Sleep well?"

"Up until the point when the personality decided to try to wake me up with a message, yes," she replied.

"A message?" he asked, obviously curious.

"Uh-huh. It's not marked as urgent, though, so it can wait until after breakfast," she replied. _Mornings, bleah!_ She was on holiday, dammit, and therefore, should be allowed to sleep in until whatever time she felt like. Throwing on a robe, she made her way to the kitchen of the house, shambling like a dead thing.

"Morning, Syrinx," her mother, Athene, said, sounding cheerful enough that Syrinx wondered if she was still asleep and trapped in a nightmare where everyone but her was able to go from sleep to full wakefulness in less than five seconds without the help of coffee. Oh wait, that was reality.

She was about to reply when she saw that breakfast had been laid out on the table for her, including the life-preserver known as coffee. Seeing her daughter's attention focus suddenly shift, Athene chuckled lightly. "I had the housechimps serve up breakfast for you when I heard you coming," she said with a smile.

Mumbling her thanks, Syrinx absent-mindedly patted the housechimp on the head as she passed it, even though she knew that it was pointless - they were all controlled by the habitat personality - but, as a child, she'd found them cute, and even at the age of thirty-seven, she was unable to shake the childhood habit. Then again, she hadn't tried too hard, either.

The housechimp - which did, indeed, look somewhat like a small chimpanzee, although no chimp ever had golden fur, or human hands and feet - shivered slightly, and made a quiet 'ook' sound, which she had always interpreted as 'you're welcome', as she sat down at the table and, temporarily bypassing the food, reached for the coffee pot and poured herself a mug.

"What's on the agenda for today?" Athene asked, taking a seat opposite her daughter as Ruben entered the room. "Morning, Ruben."

"Good morning, Athene," Ruben replied, taking the seat next to Syrinx, and a housechimp served up breakfast to him as well.

"Not a lot," Syrinx said, answering Athene's question. "There's only two more days to go before I have to get back to work, and I want to enjoy them." As more brain cells were kicked into life by the coffee, she remembered the message she'd received earlier. "Hold that thought," she added, and accessed the message.

It was a request from Ione that she pick up someone from Norfolk and take him back to the Sol system, for which, she'd be paid half-again the normal charter rate. There weren't too many more details, but what details there were was enough to catch her attention. The question was; would she do it? The money would be good, and she was willing to do a favour for Ione, but was she willing to cut her holiday short?

In the end, the answer was 'yes'. Ione was a friend. And besides, how stressful could a simple trip to pick someone up and take them somewhere be?

**_Oenone_?**

**Yes?** The voidhawk's tone was eager. Syrinx couldn't blame it; after all, it had been nearly three weeks since they'd flown, and the voidhawk was getting bored.

**It looks like you won't be bored any more; we've got a charter. Will you inform the rest of the crew and tell them to meet at Athene's house in three hours, please?**

**At last!** Yes, the voidhawk was _definitely_ eager. **I will pass on the message.**

**Thank you.**

"You're looking suspiciously happy all of a sudden," Athene remarked.

"Ione Saldana has offered me a charter," Syrinx explained. "Nothing overly complicated - pick someone up from Norfolk and bring him back to the Sol system, for which, she'll pay me half-again the normal charter rate."

"I don't suppose that your eagerness to accept has anything to do with the fact that you might get a chance to see Joshua, perhaps?"

"Mother!" she exclaimed, startled that Athene would suggest such a thing. She blushed hotly when both Athene and Ruben chuckled. "I thought you agreed to stop that."

"Why should I?" Athene said with a small smile, taking a sip of her coffee.

"Because you promised, perhaps?" Syrinx pointed out.

"Oh yes, that's right."

Syrinx sighed. She doubted that her mother would ever stop seeing if she could embarrass her. Deliberately changing the subject, she asked Ruben, "What do you think of the charter?"

"I think it's a good idea," Ruben said. "Although the holiday has been a nice break, it'll still be good to start flying again." Athene nodded her agreement.

"I told _Oenone_ to get the crew to meet here," Syrinx told Athene, more out of politeness than anything else. "They should be here in about three hours or so, and then we leave for Norfolk."

********

**_Cricklade Manor, Stoke County  
Kesteven Island, Norfolk  
16th June, 2614_**

Xander crawled out of bed, feeling like a thousand hoofed animals had stampeded around his skull before leaving through his mouth, pausing only to graze and defecate on his tongue. His only coherent thought was a vague wish that he would die. At least his head wouldn't hurt so much.

He managed to get through the normal morning clean-up processes without too much difficulty, before dragging himself to the dining room. On the way, he cursed the birds that were singing at the windows, both for being so cheerful, and for daring to make noise.

Upon arrival, he made a bee-line for the coffee pot, somehow finding the energy to scowl at Joshua. How dare he look so fresh? He'd had _at least_ as much as Xander to drink last night... probably _more_, actually. Then again, he also had the advantage of neural nanonic programs, and probably a medical nanonic as well.

Xander was even more determined to get neural nanonics now.

"_Good_ morning, Xander," Joshua said cheerfully.

Xander mumbled something that could be taken either way as he poured himself a mug of coffee. _He's too damn cheerful_, Xander thought sluggishly. _Why can't he be miserable and hungover like I am?_

As if to prove the universe was out to get him, Louise and Gen entered the dining room. "Good morning, Xander," Gen chirped.

Somehow, he wasn't able to be as sullen to Gen as he was towards Joshua. "Morning, Gen," he managed to say, while Louise shot him a sympathetic look. She knew the tendency of Joshua to have a few drinks at the slightest pretext. Remembering the last time Joshua's brother had dropped by for a visit made her shudder at the memory. Both Calvert brothers had attempted to out-drink each other, and made complete fools of themselves. Looking back on it, though, there was some humour to be found, but not in this situation.

Taking pity on Xander, she went to one of the side cupboards and opened one of the doors, extracting what she called the 'emergency hangover treatment kit', used when Joshua forgot to activate his neural nanonic detoxification programs before he went to bed after a few drinks.

From it, she plucked a medical nanonic, which she handed to Xander. "Wrap this around your throat, Xander," she said. "Make sure it isn't too tight, and make sure the ends meet."

He gave the green rubbery substance an odd look before he decided to trust what Louise had just told him. It wasn't that he didn't trust Louise; it was that he was leery of wrapping something around his neck in general.

Seeing his look, Louise explained. "It'll get rid of some of the nasties in your bloodstream, and infuse a mild analgesic, which will make your hangover seem less painful."

Following Louise's instructions, Xander wrapped the medical nanonic around his neck, and felt a slight tingling sensation as it activated, sending tendrils through the skin of his neck and into his bloodstream, with the intention of filtering out the metabolic by-products of the alcohol he had consumed last night. He sighed in relief as the mild painkiller was infused into his bloodstream, reducing the amount of pain he was feeling.

"Thanks, Louise," he said gratefully, and then a concern bored home. "How much of an idiot of myself did I make last night?"

"Not too bad," Louise reassured him. "Particularly compared to the last time Liol visited," she added, glancing at Joshua.

"You're not going to let me live that down, are you?" Joshua said with a slight wince.

"Not for a while, no," Louise replied with a small smirk, and Xander snickered at Joshua's expense.

Joshua turned a pleading expression towards his wife, and she relented. "All right, I'll stop picking on you," she said with a smile.

"What about you, Xander?" he asked.

Xander shrugged. "I suppose so," he replied in a tone suggesting that he was doing Joshua a favour.

"Thanks."

Breakfast was eaten pretty much in silence, and Xander's condition improved as the medical nanonic worked on filtering the toxins from his bloodstream. Just as Joshua was about to rise from the table to start the day's work, he felt an affinity hail, with Syrinx's identity trait.

**Hello, Joshua.**

**Hi Syrinx, and hello to you too, _Oenone_. What brings you here?**

**Hello, Joshua**, the voidhawk said.

**A charter. Ione asked me to pick someone up and take him to the Sol system**, Syrinx replied. **There wasn't much in the way of details, though. Would you happen to have any idea who the passenger is supposed to be?**

**As a matter of fact, I do. In fact, he's sitting across from me right now. Why don't you come on down and meet him?**

**Will do, Joshua. See you in about an hour or so.**

The affinity contact ended, and Joshua blinked to see both Louise and Xander looking at him with curious expressions. "What was that about?" Xander asked.

"Syrinx called," Joshua replied. "Apparently she's been sent by Ione to pick you up, Xander."

"I guess that means my holiday's over," Xander said with a touch of sadness. He'd really enjoyed his time on Norfolk, and was somewhat reluctant for it to end. Joshua, Louise and Gen had helped him adjust to his new surroundings quite well - as Ione had hoped when she'd brought him to Norfolk - although there were still a couple of things that they were unable to adequately describe, such as what he would experience when he had neural nanonics implanted or what he would see when he arrived in the Sol system. They'd taken him along to Boston when Gen had had her neural nanonics implanted, but having them implanted himself would be a completely different experience.

Looking around the table, he added, "I just want to say thanks for everything, I guess." Words failed him at that point, as he had to swallow to clear a lump in his throat.

"It was a pleasure, Xander," Louise said with a smile.

"What she said," Joshua agreed, and Gen nodded.

"Still, you guys have helped me a lot," Xander said in mild protestation. "Especially in helping me to adjust to where I am now. If that doesn't deserve thanks, I don't know what does."

"It was our pleasure, Xander," Louise repeated, and Xander bowed to the inevitable.

Suddenly, Joshua grinned and left the room, coming back with a bottle of Norfolk Tears and four glasses. "Oh, crap," Xander moaned. "No more... please."

"Don't worry, Xander," Joshua said. "This is just a toast."

"That's not much of an improvement," Xander muttered as Joshua opened the bottle, poured four glasses, and handed them around.

With a hint of reluctance, Xander accepted his, and waited for Joshua to make the toast. "To Xander," Joshua said simply, raising his glass. "May he continue to kick arse, both on Earth, and when he gets home."

"To Xander," Louise and Gen chorused as they drained their glasses, with Joshua and Xander following suit.

"C'mon," Gen said. "I'll help you pack your stuff." Grabbing Xander by the hand, she practically dragged him from the room before he could even think of protesting.

Joshua and Louise watched them leave. "She likes him, doesn't she?" Louise commented.

Joshua shrugged. "He's a likeable enough bloke," he replied.

"That isn't quite what I meant," she pointed out.

"Oh," he said, and thought about it for a moment, before shrugging. Although there _were_ parallels to his first visit to Norfolk, he doubted that anything had happened between Xander and Genevieve. Apart from anything else, there hadn't been that many chances for anything to happen. There was also the fact that Gen strongly reminded Xander of one of his friends back in his time.

Also, his intuition told him that nothing had happened between the two, and his intuition had yet to lead him wrong.

"I wasn't saying that anything _has_ happened between them," Louise pointed out. "It's just that Gen might mope around the house for a few days after Xander leaves, and she'll more than likely be reluctant to talk about it."

"Fair enough," Joshua said simply.

********

Although Xander had left most of his belongings packed away, he'd used enough to require most of the hour to pack them away, even with Gen's help. The enthusiasm she showed for the task made Xander feel slightly uncomfortable. He'd noticed that she'd developed a crush on him about five days ago, which he supposed was slightly flattering, but the situation was too similar to that with Dawn back home to allow him to do anything about it. There was also the fact that she had only just turned sixteen to take into consideration, not to mention the fact that Joshua would quite probably kick his arse if he did. _Not_ something he wanted to happen.

So he'd acted as if he simply didn't notice, remaining friendly towards Gen, while ignoring her attempts at flirtation - to be honest, some of it had been fairly clumsy - and the times she 'accidentally' brushed up against him, although that had trailed off over the last couple of days, which had caused him to wonder if either Louise or Joshua had spoken to the teenager.

Now she was enthusiastically helping him pack, although he suspected that it had more to do with the fact that it was a legitimate opportunity to spend an hour alone with him than the fact that he was leaving. His suspicion was proved when they'd finished packing and the domestic staff had carried the bags downstairs.

"I wish you weren't leaving," Gen confessed suddenly, sitting down on the edge of the bed and looking like she was on the verge of tears.

Not knowing what else to do, he sat down beside her and gently placed a hand on her shoulder. "I'm not too happy about it either, Gen. But I've got to go to Earth," he said.

Gen turned slightly, so that she was facing him. "No, you don't," she said sternly. "You don't have to prove anything to anyone. So why are you so insistent on going?"

Shrugging uncomfortably, he replied, "It's not so much as me wanting to prove myself, as the fact that I can't sit back and _not_ try to help. I can't really explain it, it's just... something I have to do," he finished weakly.

"You've been fighting evil for over four years," she pointed out. "With no special abilities or powers to help you. Don't you think you've earned the right to step aside from the fight?"

If she'd used a different tone of voice, he would have bristled at those words. Instead, he felt somewhat touched by the concern in her voice. Sighing, he answered, "When I first started fighting vampires, I made a decision to stay with it until the end, and I intend to stick with that decision. Even if my friends have been less than friendly of late, it's _my_ decision, and it should be up to _me_ as to whether or not I stay with it."

Gen nodded, but he could tell that there was more than a hint of reluctance in the gesture. "I understand, Xander," she said, before scowling suddenly.

"What's up?" Xander asked, feeling a little nervous for some indefinable reason.

"Louise just datavised me to let me know that _Oenone_'s flyer has just landed," she replied. Her scowl abruptly vanished, to be replaced with a despondent expression. "I wish you weren't going," she said again.

"I know, Gen. But I _might_ get a chance to come back here before I have to go back to my time," he said gently, which caused Gen's expression to brighten somewhat. "_Might_, Gen," he cautioned. "I'm not making any promises." He stood up, and offered her a hand, which she grabbed and use to pull herself into a standing position, holding on to it for slightly longer than was strictly necessary. "C'mon, let's get downstairs before Joshua and Louise become suspicious."

********

Joshua met Syrinx at the door of the manor house. "Hi, Syrinx," he said, hugging her and kissing her on the cheek.

"Hi, Joshua," she replied, returning the hug. "Hi, Louise," she added, giving Louise a hug as well.

"Hello, Syrinx," Louise replied. "It's good to see you again. You too, Ruben, Serina, Oxley."

The other Edenists returned Louise's greetings, before taking seats at the table. "So, who's this passenger that I'm supposed to pick up?" Syrinx asked.

"His name is Xander Harris," Joshua replied. "And..." his voice trailed off when he saw that the Edenists were staring at him with amazed expressions.

"You mean the same Xander Harris that was the originator of the Harris File?" Ruben asked slowly.

"Well, yeah," Joshua replied. "But how did you - oh, Consensus, right?" All four Edenists nodded. "So you know about his story, then?"

All four Edenists nodded again. "It's pretty amazing, too," Syrinx said. "I thought the possessed were bad enough, but this is worse."

"What strikes me as being disturbing is the fact that up until the late twentieth century, young women were basically forced to battle against vampires and the like by themselves," Ruben said. Seeing the looks that were sent his way by Syrinx, Serina and Louise, he added, "The key part of that last sentence being 'by themselves', of course," which caused the women to nod their agreement, Syrinx and Serina in particular. Thanks to affinity, no Edenist was ever truly alone, so long as there was another Edenist within affinity range - one hundred kilometres for individual Edenists; thirty Astronomical Units for voidhawks and habitats - because one of the most important things about affinity was the ability to share thoughts and emotions. Sorrow was reduced, and joys were reinforced, which led to most Edenists being incredibly stable, emotion-wise, and having a degree of self-confidence that most Adamists envied. In fact, a lot of Adamists so envied the poise displayed by Edenists that they labelled it arrogance.

"It seems that Alexander was the first to break that cycle," Serina said, "by offering his help to the Slayer of the time, Elizabeth Summers. In fact, without his help, she wouldn't have survived very long at all."

"True," Oxley agreed. "In fact-"

He stopped short when Xander and Gen appeared in the doorway, where they stopped dead as every eye in the room was turned their way.

********

Xander came to an abrupt halt in the doorway as he laid eyes on two of the most beautiful women he'd ever seen in his life - and that was saying something, considering some of the women he'd known. Both were wearing figure-hugging blue tunics and leggings - of course, he didn't know that one of the requirements for clothing that was to be worn by those in the spaceflight industry was that it had to be almost skin-tight, so that no creases could form, particularly under high acceleration - which accentuated the fact that their bodies could only be described as 'trim'.

The one on the left had rich auburn hair that hung to just above her shoulders, and as she turned to face him, he was fairly certain that her eyes were a deep jade-green, and she had a slight Oriental cast to her features.

The other one had skin darker than anyone else he had ever seen, curly black hair that also hung to just above her shoulders, brown eyes that were a couple of shades darker than his own and features delicate enough that he couldn't help but think of a porcelain doll.

The auburn-haired woman spoke up in a rich contralto voice, and Xander could feel more parts of his brain go into shut-down as she said, "I'm assuming you're Alexander Harris, correct? I'm Syrinx, captain of _Oenone_, and Ione asked me to take you to the Sol system."

Bullying his brain and vocal cords into some semblance of functionality, Xander replied, "Yeah, that's me. But I'd prefer it if you called me Xander. I only get called Alexander when I'm in trouble."

Syrinx nodded. "Fair enough, Xander. I'd like to introduce you to some of my crew. This is Ruben, who looks after the fusion systems; Serina, who maintains the life-support systems in the crew toroids; and Oxley, the spaceplane pilot for _Oenone_." As they were introduced, each crew-member smiled and said 'Hi'. Ruben appeared to be in late middle age, while Oxley looked about the same age as Syrinx, maybe a little older.

Xander nodded to each crew-member in turn and said, "Pleased to meet you all."

"Are you ready to go?" Joshua asked.

Xander nodded, with a touch of reluctance. "Yeah," he said.

"No sense in prolonging it, then," Joshua said as he rose from the table and led everyone outside. The cases with Xander's belongings in them were stacked neatly at the foot of the stairs, forming a considerably smaller pile than when he had arrived. Over the last two days, Louise and Gen had helped him go through the things Ione had bought for him, and reduced the amount of clothing he would take to Earth enough that only three bags were required, an amount Xander could carry himself.

This time, however, he didn't have to, as Joshua, Louise and Gen each grabbed a bag and carried them over to the base of the ion-field flyer's airstair. Dumping the bags, they made their final farewells. Joshua shook Xander's hand, saying, "Kick arse on Earth, okay?"

Louise hugged him and said, "Take care of yourself."

Gen also hugged him, and then she stood on tiptoes and gave him a quick peck on the lips. "Be safe," she said in a near-whisper, before releasing him and running back into the manor house.

"Well, _that_ was unexpected," Xander muttered as he hauled his bags up the airstair, and Joshua and Louise retreated to a safe distance before the ion-field flyer took off.

After stowing the bags in the small internal cargo area, he strapped himself into the seat Serina guided him to, following her instructions as to how to use the restraint webbing fitted to the seat. Not that it was difficult; it was simply a matter of pulling the webbing down so that it sat over his body - it would tighten or loosen automatically as required.

"Everyone strapped in?" Oxley called back from the cockpit as he brought the flyer's engines on-line.

"Ready," Serina answered.

"And away we go."

Xander felt heavier as the flyer lifted off from the ground, headed straight up - towards orbit. _Towards orbit_, he realised. _I'm going into space_. Technically for the second time, but the trip from Tranquillity to Norfolk didn't count, as he'd been in zero-tau for that. He didn't know what to expect once they docked with _Oenone_, but he doubted that it would be anything like what he'd seen on 'Star Trek', somehow.

So he simply resolved to take things as they came, and hope there was nothing _too_ surprising in store.

********

From her bedroom window, Gen watched as the flyer lifted off and headed towards orbit. She wasn't crying - not exactly - but a tear _did_ trickle down her cheek. "Goodbye, Xander," she whispered.


	11. Touristy Stuff and Xander Version 2

**_Title: In Their Shadow - Chapter 14_**

**_Author: Robert Cox (smeghead_76@dodo.com.au)_**

**_Disclaimer: Buffy is owned by Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy productions. The Night's Dawn trilogy is owned by Peter F. Hamilton. At least until the copyright runs out, anyway. Since that won't happen for a long time at the least, I've just gotta hope that no-one takes offence._**

**_Summary: Xander has been transported to the 27th century. Can he adapt to life in the future? Can he ever return home? And, more to the point, can the guy stay out of trouble for once?_**

**_Rating: M-15+ (Australian system)_**

**_AN: Thanks to Grossclout, who volunteered for beta-ing duties in the later parts._**

**_AN2: There are a couple of non-standard methods of communication used in this story, represented as follows:_ Affinity _ and _**{Datavises}

* * *

**_Voidhawk_ Oenone, _interplanetary space  
Twenty million kilometres above the North Stellar Pole, Sol System  
17th June, 2614_**

The voidhawk emerged from the wormhole, which closed behind it, and reconfigured its distortion field for normal space travel. The passengers, of course, never noticed a thing, due to the fact that voidhawks are capable of manipulating their distortion fields to provide gravity for the life-support toroids. In fact, both voidhawks and blackhawks were also capable of using their distortion fields to provide a counteracting force to the effect of manoeuvres of up to four gravities, while providing a steady one-gee environment in the life-support toroids.

Syrinx, of course, knew that they had swallowed into the Sol system. After all, course choices were a joint intuitive choice between a voidhawk and its captain, which was hardly surprising, given that each voidhawk captain spent a year gestating within 'their' voidhawk.

Looking over at the spare acceleration couch that Xander was secured to by his acceleration webbing, she saw that he was chatting animatedly with Serina and Ruben. Even _Oenone_ was making the occasional comment, to her surprise. The voidhawk rarely got involved in conversations with passengers.

**He's a nice young man**, _Oenone_ told her. **I like him**.

Syrinx smothered a grin. Obviously, the voidhawk had picked up the general gist of her thoughts. **You say that about almost everyone I meet. First Joshua, and then Mosul. Have you ever met anyone you _didn't_ like?**

**Not so far**, the voidhawk replied. **Xander is also very polite. He hasn't asked how old Ruben is, or made any comment about your relationship, for instance.**

**That's true**. _Everyone_ she'd met had asked how old Ruben was, and their reactions when they'd found out that, at the age of one hundred and thirty-seven, he was almost precisely a century older than her, had been a cause of some mild amusement for her. Xander had been just about the first person - apart from Joshua - who hadn't asked, or made some sort of comment. **Although I suspect that that may have something to do with the fact that the relationship between Buffy and Angel involved a larger age gap**, she pointed out.

**That is a possibility.**

"We've arrived in the Sol system," she announced, more for Xander's benefit than anything else, as the other crew members already knew thanks to their affinity link with the voidhawk. "At the moment, we're twenty million kilometres above the North Stellar Pole. Xander, if you'd care to look at the AV pillar in front of you, you'll see something that might interest you." Complying with her affinity request, _Oenone_ focused its sensor blisters on the inner solar system, and projected the resulting display through the Audio-Visual pillar in front of Xander's acceleration couch.

Xander had used AV pillars a number of times while staying with Joshua, and had found them easy to use - 'look into the light' was about the extent of the instructions - and as he turned his head so that the pulses of encoded light played across his eyes, an image slid down his optic nerves and blossomed in his mind. What he saw was this:

A very large, extremely bright, object at the centre of the view that was obviously the sun - _Oenone_ had brought several filters on-line so as not to damage Xander's eyesight - and a small bright dot, barely visible against the glare of the sun, that was Mercury.

Further out was a larger dot - Xander thought that he could barely make out hints of yellow and white - that indicated the position of Venus.

The truly amazing thing was in the third orbital slot, however.

Forty-seven bright blue-green dots, all tracing their orbital paths around the primary in procession. One of them was Earth, Xander knew, with the other forty-six the former stage one colony worlds that Joshua had put there at the end of the possession crisis. Of course, Joshua had told him this, but seeing it like this really drove the point home.

For Xander, simply seeing Earth from space probably would have been awe-inspiring enough, but this brought it to a whole new level. In fact, he barely registered the orange-red dot that was Mars - despite the successful terraforming of the planet, over two-thirds of the surface was still desert - and the sprinkling of dots at the very edge of the image that marked some of the larger asteroids.

To put it simply, this was a view that very few people had seen before. Most of the starships - voidhawks, blackhawks and Adamist starships - that travelled to and from the Sol system used the emergence zones for the planet they were arriving at or departing. Not many were willing to incur the expenditure of time or fuel required - although fuel wasn't a concern for the bitek starships - to manoeuvre themselves into an appropriate position.

"Wow," Xander said softly. At that moment, his expression was that of pure awe, and all of the cynicism, bitterness and barely-controlled anger that had seeped into his personality over the past two years had evaporated, leaving only his sense of wonder - which was being stimulated by the view he was seeing.

Hearing the awe in his voice, Syrinx and the others shared grins throughout the bridge. The first time _Oenone_ had spoken to him had caused no small amount of surprise, but over the last day-and-a-half, he had recovered sufficiently to take part in conversations with the voidhawk, although there was still amazement in his voice whenever he talked to _Oenone_.

Truth be told, the voidhawk wasn't the only one who liked the young man. Once they'd gotten to know him, all of the other crew-members had found themselves liking Xander as well. Making friends, it seemed, was just something he seemed to do well. That, combined with what Joshua had told her of Xander's desire to have a better opportunity to see what the interior of a habitat looked like, made the decision she was about to make a lot easier.

She was going to take him on a brief visit to Romulus. A brief affinity discussion with the crew and _Oenone_ revealed that they felt pretty much the same way themselves, and a fraction of a second later, energy flowed through the voidhawk's patterning cells once more as it initiated a swallow manoeuvre to one of Saturn's emergence zones.

********

**_Emergence zone TRN-9310, 750,000-kilometre orbit  
Saturn, Sol System  
17th June, 2614_**

Saturn, like Jupiter, was a hive of Edenist activity. Unlike Jupiter, however, the focus of activity was not Helium-3 mining. Instead, Saturn was the premier voidhawk base in the Confederation. The first voidhawks had been gestated here in the year 2225, along with the habitats Romulus and Remus to serve as bases.

Since then, the increasing numbers of voidhawks had meant a corresponding increase in the number of habitats required to support them, along with their crews, to over three hundred, with more being germinated every year.

Although there was no _commercial_ mining of Helium-3 from Saturn, cloudscoops were still lowered into the planet's atmosphere to meet the Saturnian habitats' fuel requirements. Even though the vast majority of the power requirements of each habitat was met by the organic induction cables that swept through the immense magnetosphere of the gas giant, there was still a requirement for fusion generators, mainly to serve as a backup in case _all_ of the induction cables for a habitat were lost at once. Also, every voidhawk was also able to draw power from a fusion generator, increasing the number of sequential swallows it was able to undertake before needing to recharge its energy reserves from ten to twenty.

Edenists are nothing if not thorough in their contingency planning.

When _Oenone_ emerged from its wormhole, it was immediately hailed by Saturn Traffic Control.

**Voidhawk _Oenone_, requesting approach clearance to Romulus**, the voidhawk replied.

**Clearance granted, _Oenone_. Handing you over to Romulus Traffic Control now.**

**Thank you.**

As the voidhawk negotiated approach clearance to its home habitat, it shared its view with Xander and the crew. Predictably, it had more of an effect on Xander than the crew who, after all, had seen it many times before.

It was still spectacular and worth seeing, of course.

The multi-coloured cloud bands writhed against each other in their perpetual struggle, and Earth-sized hurricanes twisted and moved as the complex gravitational interactions between Saturn and its closest moons stirred the planet's atmosphere with giant invisible fingers. A dark dot trekking across the face of the planet was one of its moons - Titan, probably, or perhaps Mimas.

Seeing an object which wasn't all that much smaller than Earth itself reduced to insignificance next to the majestic bulk of Saturn drove home to Xander the immense scale of the spectacle before him. They were approaching from slightly above the plane of the ecliptic, so Xander also got a good view of Saturn's famed rings.

_Oenone_'s sensor resolution wasn't good enough to pick out individual ring particles, but he could still pick out the rotation of the rings. Outside the furthermost ring, there were reddish-brown cylinders visible, each one surrounded by a halo of thin lines extending at right angles as the cylinders rotated. The long axis of the cylinders - habitats - was perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic, so they appeared to be rolling along their orbital paths.

One habitat was centred in the view, and appeared to be growing larger as they approached. "I take it that's where we're headed?" Xander asked.

"That's right," Syrinx replied. "Although this probably isn't the destination Ione had in mind for you, I think we can afford to take the time to pay a quick visit."

Xander briefly thought of protesting, but decided not to. Apart from anything else, he didn't think he'd achieve too much. Besides, he was curious. After all of the other marvels he'd witnessed so far, he wanted to find out what else he would be shown. Given the trend so far, he doubted that it would be anything but extraordinary.

********

**_Counter-rotating Spaceport, Habitat 'Romulus'  
Saturn orbit, Sol System  
17th June, 2614_**

Of course, Xander first had to traverse the free-fall environment of the spaceport.

Unsurprisingly, he was terrible at it, having never been exposed to it before, and only quick actions on the part of _Oenone_'s crew prevented him from doing himself an injury by hitting walls, ceiling or floor... or other people, for that matter.

At least he wasn't sick, although the grimace he wore indicated that, at times, it was an option.

Even moving as quickly as possible, it still took them nearly half an hour to reach the point where the gravity was strong enough for Xander to start playing a more active role in moving himself. "Thanks, guys," he said with some relief. "Floating around might look like fun, but it's something that takes a while to get used to."

That was a concept Syrinx and the others had some difficulty grasping - like all Edenists, and Adamists in the spaceflight industry, they had had geneering to give them perfect floating-point balance, which eliminated all forms of motion sickness.

All of a sudden, both Syrinx and Serina were grinning wickedly, causing Xander to wonder why. Then, from the darkest depths of his imagination, came, _One thing that would be_ really _interesting in free-fall would be sex..._

The mental image that thought conjured up, while interesting, caused Xander to gulp. Not only would he be more than likely to throw up - _always_ a mood-killer - but he'd probably drift into something... probably something with sharp and inconvenient edges, too. _And can I just say,_ 'OUCH'_?_

With that thought, the mental image disappeared, which was probably just as well, since they'd reached the entrance to Romulus' interior. The sudden change in the light caused Xander to blink a few times before his vision cleared and he was able to get a good view of the parkland that make up the majority of the inhabitable area.

And it was a damned impressive sight too. There were parks, forests, lakes and rolling grasslands. Above it all, the axial light tube provided the same sort of light provided by Earth's sun. Currently, the fusion-powered light-tube was simulating mid-morning, and Xander wasn't able to tell the difference from any normal day he was used to.

A gentle tug on the arm from Syrinx reminded him that he was gawking like a tourist - which he was, in a way - and standing in the middle of the entrance to the spaceport. Blushing slightly, he stepped to one side before resuming his staring. Something on the edge of vision caught his attention, and he peered into the distance to see-

What he was thinking of as 'the ground' rising up in a huge arc, up past the light-tube. Casting a glance over his shoulder, he looked behind him to see pretty much the same thing happening behind him. Craning his head backward, he tried to look past the light-tube, and he managed to dimly see both 'walls' meet high above him. Suddenly hit by a wave of vertigo, he shook his head to clear it, and resolved not to do that again. _This_ is _a cylinder, after all_, he realised. _So it shouldn't come as a surprise that something like this would happen_.

"So, what do you think?" Startled from his reverie, he looked to one side to see Serina standing beside him, grinning at his reaction.

"It's... amazing," he said slowly. "And it'd be a fair bet to assume that Tranquillity looks like this as well?"

"It's a bet you'd win," Serina agreed. "But on a larger scale, since Tranquillity is somewhat bigger than Romulus."

"Fair enough," Xander said, not yet accustomed to his new surroundings.

"Come on," Syrinx spoke up from his other side. "There's someone I want you to meet."

"Who would that be?"

"You'll see."

Xander let himself be guided towards the nearest tube-train nexus. Whatever was going to happen next, it was sure to be interesting.

Syrinx contacted Athene via affinity. **Mother?**

**Yes, Syrinx?**

**Would you mind if I dropped in for lunch? The rest of my crew, along with another person, are coming along as guests.**

**Not at all. You should know that. And who's the guest?**

**I just thought I'd give you fair warning, and you'll have to wait and see.**

**Your mystery passenger from Norfolk, perhaps? And since you only spoke of one guest, I'm assuming that it isn't Joshua.**

**Mother!**

As Syrinx ended the affinity contact, the last thing she heard was Athene's 'laughter'.

********

After a short journey in a tube-carriage - which Xander couldn't help but compare to a subway system - they reached the small valley which held Athene's house. During the short walk to the house, Xander was still admiring the surroundings - the landscape, rather than the occasional Edenist woman the small group passed, although he found them to be universally beautiful as well, with only the exact level of beauty varying.

When he reached the arm of the valley that the house nestled in, he stopped dead. It seemed to sit so perfectly in place that it became difficult to tell where the house ended and the ground began. Well-maintained lawns and gardens surrounded it on all sides, and sheep wandered placidly throughout the area, ensuring that the lawn stayed well-trimmed... _Waaaitaminnit... those are_ not _sheep._ No _sheep I've ever seen is gold-coloured. And are those_ monkeys _I see working in the garden?_

"Errr... Syrinx," he said slowly. "What are those?" He pointed at the 'animals'.

"Bitek constructs," Syrinx said with a small smile.

"Bitek?"

"Sort of like _Oenone_, but on a smaller scale. They're geneered - genetically-engineered - animals used for maintenance tasks, such as gardening."

"Oh," Xander mumbled, still staring at the bitek servitors.

Still grinning, Syrinx led him to where one of the 'monkeys' was working. Picking up the presence of humans, the servitor ceased its work and stood still, in case there were updated instructions for it. Not that Syrinx would consider overriding Athene's instructions, of course.

Closer up, Xander could see where the resemblance to a normal monkey ended. The fact that it had human-looking hands and feet could be considered something of a heavy hint. "This is a housechimp, Xander," Syrinx said. "It's mainly used for domestic tasks, such as cleaning up, cooking, gardening and the like."

Xander couldn't help but consider the semi-permanent state of clutter that passed for normal in his apartment and grinning wryly at the thought of having one of them so that the level of mess would be reduced from 'I _know_ there's a floor under here _somewhere_' to 'merely untidy'. He somehow doubted, however, that he'd be allowed to take one back with him.

"Come on," Syrinx said. "The reason I brought you here - and that includes the habitat - is that I want you to meet someone."

Following the winding path across the lawn, Syrinx led the group to the front door, which she opened without knocking. Xander wondered about that for a moment, before realising that she'd probably alerted the person who lived here to her arrival via affinity.

_People_ would have been a more accurate to put it, since as soon as she stepped through the door, she was greeted by a cry of "SYRINX!" Following close behind, Xander saw her mobbed by a fairly large group of children, ranging in age from toddlers to teenagers. For the next few minutes, she was kept busy; offering greetings and hugs to each and every one of the children as they enthusiastically asked where she'd been for the past few days, and who her friend was.

"Everyone, this is Xander," she announced.

"Hello, Xander," was the chorused response from the children.

"Erm... hi everyone," Xander managed to say, eyeing the children in a slightly nervous manner, just in case they decided to extend the same boisterous greeting to him as they did to Syrinx.

Syrinx saw this, and decided to take pity on him. "Come on, Xander, this way," she said, leading him by the arm through the throng of children who, seeing that the new person they'd just met was unable to stay, practically stampeded out the front door, eliciting a chuckle from Syrinx. When Xander gave her a questioning look, she smiled and said. "Before too long, the garden is going to look like a disaster zone. The servitors are going to have a lot of work to do to make it presentable again."

Xander smirked and said, "Kids, huh?"

Any response Syrinx might have made was interrupted by the arrival of a woman who appeared to in her late middle age and whose appearance Xander could only describe as 'distinguished'. The resemblance between her and Syrinx was close enough to make it obvious that this was Syrinx's mother.

"Mother, I'd like you to meet Xander Harris. Xander, this is Athene, my mother."

Giving Syrinx a look that promised payback for this later, Athene extended her hand to Xander. "Pleased to meet you, Xander. Your exploits make an interesting - and disturbing - tale."

Shaking Athene's hand, Xander replied, "Likewise," before her second sentence sank in fully. "Has _everyone_ seen that damned file?" he asked plaintively.

Athene chuckled and shook her head. "Not literally everyone, Xander," she reassured him. Xander started to look relieved, when Athene continued with a slight grin, "Just most of the people you're likely to meet."

Xander's relieved expression vanished instantly. "Your mother has a twisted sense of humour, Syrinx," he commented.

Syrinx smirked and replied, "Yes. Yes, she does. For some reason, she seems to delight in seeing how much she can embarrass me."

Athene tried to look innocent, but the effect was spoiled by the slight grin on her face. "It builds character, dear, as you well know."

"In that case, I must have the best-built character of all Edenists," Syrinx shot back.

By this time, Xander and Syrinx's crew were snickering quietly, but stopped when both Syrinx and Athene turned semi-serious looks their way. "Something funny?" Syrinx asked, which caused her crew to make defensive denials - which weren't much more than half-hearted.

Xander, however, grinned unrepentantly and said, "Yep. I find it amusing to see someone else being embarrassed; don't like it when it's me, of course, but it's funny to watch when it happens to someone else."

Athene laughed delightedly, and looped her arm through Xander's. "I knew I was going to like you," she announced. "It's nice to know that I haven't lost my ability to judge people in my old age."

As she led him towards the dining room - where housechimps were setting the table for lunch - Xander said, "You're not old, Athene. You've matured, like a fine wine."

As Athene laughed delightedly again, Syrinx shook her head ruefully. _Maybe I should have thought more carefully before introducing Xander to my mother._

********

After a hearty meal, and as the dishes were being cleared away by the housechimps - throughout the meal, Xander had persisted in feeding them bananas, much to the amusement of all - everyone retired to the sitting room with coffee.

"So, Xander," Athene started. "What do you think of Romulus so far?"

"I haven't seen a great deal so far," Xander replied. "But what I have seen looks pretty impressive." Taking a sip of his coffee, he continued, "And somehow, I get the feeling that I won't get too much of a chance to see much more, either."

Syrinx nodded. "I've pretty much used up what slack there was in the schedule," she said. Noticing the sudden shift in Xander's expression, she added, "Not that we have to leave right now... but we can't spend too long here."

Athene took this opportunity to ask a question that had been on her mind ever since the end of lunch. "So, Xander, what do you plan on doing when you get to Earth?"

"Well, I've got a stop to make at the O'Neill Halo," he replied, "where I'll be fitted with neural nanonics and AT implants. After that? I'm not sure. I guess I'll just have to take it as it comes."

Athene nodded at Xander's resolution to accept whatever came his way. "I'm sure that you'll be able to handle whatever comes your way, Xander. You seem like the sort of person that's capable of it."

Xander nodded, but his expression suggested something entirely different. "Thanks for the vote of confidence, Athene, but I'm not so sure about that. After all, I've let things get to me in the past."

"That may be true," Athene conceded, "but I think you'll do better this time."

"I hope so, Athene. I really do."

That was where they had to leave it, however. After making his farewells to Athene - along with a promise to make another visit to Romulus if he got the chance - Xander and the others returned to _Oenone_, headed towards the point where they could safely initiate a swallow manoeuvre to Earth.

At Xander's request, _Oenone_ provided him with a view of the habitat receding behind them. As it dwindled to a dot, and just prior to the swallow manoeuvre being initiated, Xander sighed quietly.

"What is it, Xander?" Syrinx asked.

"It's just that... everyone's been so helpful ever since I arrived - well, apart from a brief misunderstanding back at Tranquillity, but that was cleared up without any lasting damage," Xander said, rubbing the shoulder that had been dislocated before being patched up with a medical nanonic. "I hope that I won't let anybody down."

"Don't worry about that," Serina put in. "You'll do fine."

Xander smiled gratefully at her. "Thanks."

********

**_Marine Surgical Ward/Implant Section, Asteroid 'Normandy'  
O'Neill Halo, Sol System  
17th June, 2614_**

Once _Oenone_ swallowed into one of Earth's emergence zones, they were directed to a landing pedestal on one of the asteroids that served as a medical facility for the Govcentral military, and a short time later, Xander found himself talking with representatives of the Govcentral Marines, the Govcentral Internal Security Division, and Edenist Intelligence.

Somewhat to his surprise, Syrinx had accompanied him, saying that she had a message from Ione to pass on, which had been a request to ensure that the neural nanonics and implants that Xander received were top-of-the-line, along with an offer to meet any expenses incurred. The request was quickly agreed with - Ione's offer to pay was met with gratitude, but waved aside - and less than half an hour later, Xander found himself lying face-down on some sort of table, being prepared for neural nanonic implantation.

"So how long will this take?" he asked, as one of the medical personnel loaded the capsule containing the neural nanonics into the implant package.

"About two hours," was the reply. "This is not something that can be rushed, you know. After all, you are going to have something implanted into your _brain_, Xander. If even _one_ mistake is made, you could end up with permanent brain damage."

"Oh." In that case, Xander wanted them to be _very_ careful, indeed.

They'd shown him the capsule that contained the neural nanonics, and it hadn't looked all that impressive, truth be told. In fact, it had looked like a pill, not much larger than the ones he had swallowed to get rid of headaches.

But inside it, however, had been a densely-packed string of molecules, designed by an AI to be a computer many times more powerful than any he had ever seen before. Not that he was going to see this one, of course, as it would be implanted without the capsule ever being opened. "Hold still for a moment," he was instructed as what looked like a set of goggles was fitted over his eyes.

"What's this?" he asked, as he felt a brief tingle around his eyes as the edges annealed to his skin. When the hand that had supported them was taken away, the goggles remained in place, leaving him in darkness.

"Didactic imprinter. I'll just slot the instructional flek into place... got it. This will teach you how to use the neural nanonics once they've been implanted. Speaking of which, you might feel something on the back of your neck for a moment... right."

Xander _did_ feel another brief tingle on the back of his neck as the medical package bonded to his skin before the area went numb. "That was the implanter starting the implant process," he was told. "Now, the next thing you'll see is a green flash, followed by a purple flash, which will last for about fifteen seconds. Try not to blink. It should happen eight times."

"What happens if I do blink?"

"Not a lot - it just means that that series of instructions will have to be repeated."

"And this is how everyone learns?" Xander asked, curious.

"Yep. No schools, no classrooms. Just sit with one of these on your face for a few minutes, and that's pretty much a day's worth of learning from your time."

Naturally, Xander was enchanted by the possibilities. "How well does the information stick?"

"Better than having to have read it," came the reply, along with a small chuckle.

Before Xander could reply, there was a green flash, followed by a prolonged purple flash, the uniformity of the colour only broken by the unique monotone sparkle which a laser leaves on the retina. He _thought_ it had lasted for fifteen seconds, but there was no way to be sure. "Can I have one of these?" he asked eagerly.

"We'll see."

As promised, there were seven more cycles of green/purple flashes before he felt another tingle around his eyes, and the didactic imprinter was removed. "Okay, now what?" he asked, blinking at the sudden reintroduction of normal light.

"Now, you wait until the implantation process has been completed. I'm going to check on the AT implants you're going to receive." There was a brief pause before the medic continued. "Are you sure about this, Xander?"

Unable to nod, Xander said. "You bet. It'll let me face vampires and other nasties on more even terms."

"You won't be totally level with them in terms of strength and speed," he was warned. "Nor will you be equal to a Slayer in strength and speed. These will just give you a better chance, plus the possible benefit of surprise."

"Fair enough," Xander said. "I'll take whatever edge I can get."

There was a brief pause, and then the medic said in a I-_know_-I'm-going-to-regret-this tone, "While we're on the subject, do you want any weapons implants?"

"Weapons implants? Are they what I think they are?"

"Depends. If you think that they're weapons which are implanted in your body, then yes, they are what you think they are."

"Cool. What are the options available?"

"Too many to go into at the moment. Tell you what - you give me an idea of what you're after, and I'll narrow down the available choices, okay?"

"Sounds fair." He thought for a moment before replying. "Something close-ranged, that'll give me an edge when it gets up close and personal."

"Right. If you'll excuse me for a moment, I'll discuss it with the Intelligence people." There was a brief moment of silence, broken by a soft murmuring, before the medic spoke up again. "The implant that seems to meet your requirements the best is something the Edenists use. What it is, is the cells from an electric eel that... well, _make_ it an electric eel in the first place, implanted into your arms, and discharging through implants in your fingertips. The maximum charge is about two thousand volts. It's powered by your body, so you can't use it too many times in quick succession, or you'll pass out - and bad things will happen then."

Xander considered this. The prospect of crispy-frying any vampire that got too close to him was an appealing one. "I'll take it," he decided.

********

**_Orbital Station, Supra-Brazil Orbital Tower  
O'Neill Halo, Sol System  
18th June, 2614_**

Xander's release from the hospital had coincided with the deployment of another Marine unit into the Los Angeles arcology, so he had been sent with them. The two hours of neural nanonic implantation had been followed by another five hours of surgery as the AT implants and weapons implants were inserted in his arms and legs. There had also been some skeletal augmentation required as well - after all, it'd be damned embarrassing, not to mention painful, if the extra force generated by the artificial muscles caused multiple fractures in his arms and legs.

He had been required to stay in the hospital overnight, to ensure that the implants had been accepted by his body. Even now, he was obliged to wear clothes that were baggier than he would normally wear, so that they would fit over the medical nanonic packages covering his arms and legs to speed up his recovery from the surgery. The doctor who had carried out his pre-release examination had been satisfied with the results, and had sternly admonished him to avoid strenuous physical activity for at least the next few days, to allow the recovery process to proceed normally.

Xander had agreed, and now he was about to finally arrive on Earth - and with style as well, accompanied by a full battalion of Marines. The officers had had any number of questions for him about the situation they were about to head into. He'd been able to answer their questions regarding vampires and demons in general, but he'd been forced to ask them about the situation in Los Angeles.

After some initial surprise, they'd been forthcoming with the information.

Apparently, Jonsson - the Master Vampire causing the trouble - had stepped up his campaign to build up the number of minions under his command, and had started harassing the Marine and LAPD patrols with ambushes and raids. The first serjeants had also started to arrive, and after an initially cool reception - bitek was illegal on Earth, after all, and thanks to five centuries of religious condemnation, not very well perceived - they had proven their worth, and were well on their way to becoming accepted, even the current Pope, Elanor the Fifth, had toned down her rhetoric damning the 'soulless abominations'. Maybe she'd been told what they were fighting.

In the other domes of the arcology, vampire activity had risen as well - speculation was that they'd formed an alliance with Jonsson - which meant that not much in the way of help was available to the Sunnydale Dome. In fact, the level of vampire activity in other arcologies across Earth was starting to pick up as well... or the Govcentral officials had finally recognised it for what it was.

In short, the situation was precariously poised.

Xander was comforted somewhat, however, by the fact that the Marine officers seemed confident - but not unreasonably so - that they had a good chance at containing the situation. He'd been pleased - and a little embarrassed - when one officer had said to him, "You being here gives us confidence. After all, you managed to fight these things and win without the sort of technology we've got available to us.

"No offence or anything, but since we've got better toys to play with, that should give us a better chance against them."

Xander had assured her that no offence was taken, before another officer had pointed out that Jonsson's minions were also using modern weaponry, which had touched off a brief debate on tactics to use against them, to which Xander had listened in attentive silence. His Soldier Boy memories from that Halloween were mostly gone, but enough lingered for him to be able to recognise some of the terminology there were using. The debate ended with an agreement to stick with standard tactics, but to be ready to adopt new methods if required.

As he secured himself to his acceleration couch with the restraint harness, a question rose in Xander's mind. "Um... on a completely different subject, can someone tell me how fast these things go?"

"Normally, about three thousand kilometres per hour, but we're in a bit of a hurry, so the speed's been increased to six thousand."

"Oh." That was _fast_. Suddenly, a line from a movie he'd seen and enjoyed occurred to him. He tried to resist the temptation, but it was simply too appropriate.

"We're on an express elevator to Hell - go-ing _DOWN_!"

He had to chuckle at the series of blank expressions that was the only response to his comment.

**_End of 'In Their Shadow'_**


End file.
